In Focus:Bahujan Samaj Party

Mayawati Masterstrokes

2011-12-23T23:32:00.000-08:00

Mayawati showed great foresight and courage by conceptualising the bifurcation of Uttar Pradesh into four smaller states.As has been seen in the case of Uttarakhand and Chattisgarh,smaller states are certainly easily manageable.It is not easy to eat out all the funds meant for the development by the corrupt nexus between various forces.Some would offer contrary views citing the example of Jharkhand.But that state too has improved on various parameters despite being the hotbed of Naxal movements.

In the recent past newly created small states like Haryana,Punjab,Himachal Pradesh leaped forwards on developmental parameters.So the creation of four states as visualised by Mayawati should not be seen only from political prism.

Congress will not take this seriously as this party consider no one capable of taking any major decisions.Only the Italian wing of Gandhi family enjoys that right.Even the Maneka and Varun can't.At one point even Lal Bahadur Shastri was mocked by these people.So Mayawati should continue her good work and she will be rewarded for that from the people who matter the most.The common people of Uttar Pradesh.

Bad News For The Opposition:Mayawati would retain her position

2011-12-20T05:26:00.000-08:00

Mayawati is as good or as bad as any other politicians.She also operates in the same system and hence in order to survive has to opt for the same methods adopted by Congress and BJP stalwarts.No one dare to question the motive of Sonia Gandhi,Rahul Gandhi,L.K.Advani but they spare no chance to find fault with Mayawati.

She has the grand vision of the development and if her Ganga Expressways project fructify,that will transform the whole of Uttar Pradesh.Only she has the guts to make this a reality.But all other forces who believe in only lip services are against this.They are hell bent to oppose her all moves.They cite her penchant for parks and statues.They should understand that she has ensured that money is well spent.

Otherwise all the money sent for developmental purposes are pocketed by government officials.Now mere clerks are amassing crores.She should be given her due what she rightfully deserves.And in all likely hood she would retain her position after the assembly election.

Mayawati is never given the due credit by the conventional Media !

2011-12-01T22:58:00.001-08:00

It is very well known fact that Mayawati is never given the due credit by the conventional Media.They simply cannot fathom that she could be a development visionary as well.Everybody recognise that she is an astute politician and know her constituents rather well.

When the central government did not take care of the state highways of Bihar and UP,Mayawati came up with the idea of "Ganga Expressways".The other venture "Yamuna Expressways" is almost complete.

Mumbai and Pune benefited immensely after the construction of an Expressways connecting the both cities.So if her dream project "Ganga Express" fructify that will transform Uttar Pradesh.

Media Mangers of Mayawati should device an effective strategy so that she given due respect and her point of views are well represented.

Mayawati must have a very potent media strategy to counter Rahul Gandhi

2011-11-14T04:26:00.000-08:00

Mayawati is revered by her followers and they would stand by her in the forthcoming election.But to romp home in,Mayawati needs to win over the substantial support from the Brahmins this time also.She has taken the initiative now but will she be successful cannot be predicted now.

Rahul Gandhi seems determined to bring back the congress regime in the Uttar Pradesh at any cost and has already launched his election campaign.Rahul Ghandhi does not enjoy mass support and people flock to him due to his surname and his legacy.But the subservient media is such an awe of him that it never ever analyse his work over the years as a Congress leader.Any move by Rahul Gandhi would attract tremendous media attention.

Mayawati should have a counter strategy and that should be applied effectively till the time of Voting.If Mayawati ignores these fact then she will have no one but only herself to blame for ignoring the stated facts.

Mayawati to announce the reorganization of Uttar Pradesh

2011-11-09T04:41:00.000-08:00

Mayawati is likely to announce the reorganization of Uttar Pradesh, splitting the sprawling state into four parts, in a move that her supporters are seeing as a poll-eve masterstroke. Mayawati is planning to carve four new states out of the country's largest state which, with its 75 districts, is larger than many countries. As per the blueprint, the eastern part of the state with 32 districts will form a new state of Poorvanchal while the 22 western districts will be grouped together as Harit Pradesh. Bundelkhand will take seven districts while the remaining 14, all in central UP, will comprise the fourth.

The move has gained momentum now because of the impending elections, with BSP sources hoping that it would set the agenda for the coming polls, while diverting attention away from the incumbency.

Almost all political parties have at various times advocated division of the state into smaller units. Congress has been championing the creation of Bundelkhand on the ground that its distance from Lucknow has contributed to its backwardness. The party has not taken a stand on Harit Pradesh, but will find it difficult to oppose it because its prospective ally Ajit Singh has made it a battle theme.

BJP, which carved Uttarakhand out of UP, has consistently prided itself for its commitment to smaller states -- pointing to the creation of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand in 2000. The party has now taken cudgels for the demand for Telangana.

Under the Constitution, the power to create new states is vested with Parliament. Constitution explains that the bill for creation of new states can be introduced in either House of Parliament on the recommendation of the President. If the bill affects the area, boundaries or names of any of the states, President would refer the bill to the legislature of the state for expressing its views within a stipulated period.

Although her timing has been influenced by the looming polls, Mayawati has kept the issue burning since winning the 2007 elections. She publicly supported the division of UP while addressing a rally in Lucknow, and followed that by writing to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2008 and, again, in 2009. Most recently, she raised it in September while announcing the creation of three new districts in western UP.

BABA SAHEB –- EMANCIPATOR OF THE DOWNTRODDEN

2011-10-17T23:20:00.000-07:00

The idea of fundamental rights has become a familiar one since their enactment in the American Constitution and in the Constitution framed by the Revolutionary France. The idea of making a gift of fundamental rights to every individual is no doubt very laudable. The question is how to make them effective? The prevalent view is that once the rights are enacted in law then they are safeguarded. This again is an unwarranted assumption. As experience proves, rights are protected not by law but by social and moral conscience of the society. If social conscience is such that it is prepared to recognise the rights which law proposes to enact, rights will be safe and secure. But if the fundamental rights are opposed by the community, no Law, no Parliament, no Judiciary can guarantee them in the real sense of the world…. As Burke said, there is no method found for punishing the multitude. Law can punish a single solitary recalcitrant criminal. It can never operate against the whole body of people who choose to defy it. Social conscience is the only safeguard of all rights, fundamental or non-fundamental.
Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar

The life of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar was marked by struggles but he proved that every hurdle in life can be surmounted with talent and firm determination. The biggest barrier in his life was the caste system adopted by the Hindu society according to which the family he was born in was considered ‘untouchable’.
The Making of Baba Saheb

Born on 14th April, 1891 in Mahu Cantt in Madhya Pradesh, he was the fourteenth child of his parents.In the year 1908, young Bhimrao passed the Matriculation examination from Bombay University with flying colours. Four years later he graduated in Political Science and Economics from Bombay University and got a job in Baroda. Around the same time his father passed away. Although he was going through a bad time, Bhimrao decided to accept the opportunity to go to USA for further studies at Columbia University for which he was awarded a scholarship by the Maharaja of Baroda. Bhimrao remained abroad from 1913 to 1917 and again from 1920 to 1923. During this period he had established himself as an eminent intellectual. Columbia University had awarded him the PhD for his thesis, which was later published in a book form under the title “The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India”. But his first published article was “Castes in India - Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development”. During his sojourn in London from 1920 to 1923, he also completed his thesis titled “The Problem of the Rupee” for which he was awarded the degree of DSc. Before his departure for London he had taught at a College in Bombay and also brought out Marathi weekly whose title was ‘Mook Nayak’ (meaning ‘Dumb Hero’).

By the time he returned to India in April 1923, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar had equipped himself fully to wage war against the practice of untouchability on behalf of the untouchable and the downtrodden. Meanwhile the political situation in India had undergone substantial changes and the freedom struggle in the country had made significant progress.
Saviour of the Poor

While Bhimrao was an ardent patriot on one hand, he was the saviour of the oppressed, women and poor on the other. He fought for them throughout his life. In 1923, he set up the ‘Bahishkrit Hitkarini Sabha’ (Outcastes Welfare Association), which was devoted to spreading education and culture amongst the downtrodden, improving the economic status and raising matters concerning their problems in the proper forums to focus attention on them and finding solutions to the same.

The problems of the downtrodden were centuries old and difficult to overcome. Their entry into temples was forbidden. They could not draw water from public wells and ponds. Their admission in schools was prohibited. In 1927, he led the Mahad March at the Chowdar Tank at Colaba, near Bombay, to give the untouchables the right to draw water from the public tank where he burnt copies of the ‘Manusmriti’ publicly. This marked the beginning of the anti-caste and ant-priest movement. The temple entry movement launched by Dr. Ambedkar in 1930 at Kalaram temple, Nasik is another landmark in the struggle for human rights and social justice.
Poona Pact with Gandhiji

In the meantime, Ramsay McDonald announced the ‘Communal Award’ as a result of which in several communities including the ‘depressed classes’ were given the right to have separate electorates. This was a part of the overall design of the British to divide and rule. Gandhiji wanted to defeat this design and went on a fast unto death to oppose it. On 24th September 1932, Dr. Ambedkar and Gandhiji reached an understanding, which became the famous Poona Pact. According to this Pact, in addition to the agreement on electoral constituencies, reservations were provided for untouchables in Government jobs and legislative assemblies. The provision of separate electorate was dispensed with. The Pact carved out a clear and definite position for the downtrodden on the political scene of the country. It opened up opportunities of education and government service for them and also gave them a right to vote.

Dr. Ambedkar attended all the three Round Table Conferences in London and each time, forcefully projected his views in the interest of the ‘untouchable’. He exhorted the downtrodden sections to raise their living standards and to acquire as much political power as possible.
Independent Labour Party

After a while Dr. Ambedkar, organised the Independent Labour Party, participated in the provincial elections and was elected to the Bombay Legislative Assembly. During these days he stressed the need for abolition of the ‘Jagirdari’ system, pleaded for workers’ Fight to strike and addressed a large number of meetings and conferences in Bombay Presidency. In 1939, during the Second World War, he called upon Indians to join the Army in large numbers to defeat Nazism, which he said, was another name for Fascism.

In 1947, when India became independent, the first Prime Minister Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, invited Dr. Ambedkar, who had been elected as a Member of the Constituent Assembly from Bengal, to join his Cabinet as a Law Minister. Dr. Ambedkar had differences of opinion with the Government over the Hindu Code Bill, which led to his resignation as Law Minister.
Drafting of Indian Constitution

The Constituent Assembly entrusted the job of drafting the Constitution to a committee and Dr. Ambedkar was elected as Chairman of this Drafting Committee. While he was busy with drafting the Constitution, India faced several crises. The country saw partition and Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated.

In the beginning of 1948, Dr. Ambedkar completed the draft of the Constitution and presented it in the Constituent Assembly. In November 1949, this draft was adopted with very few amendments. Many provisions have been made in the Constitution to ensure social justice for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and backward classes.

Dr. Ambedkar was of the opinion that traditional religious values should be given up and new ideas adopted. He laid special emphasis on dignity, unity, freedom and rights for all citizens as enshrined in the Constitution.

Ambedkar advocated democracy in every field: social, economic and political. For him social Justice meant maximum happiness to the maximum number of people.

On 24 May 1956, on the occasion of Buddha Jayanti, he declared in Bombay, that he would adopt Buddhism in October. On 0ctober 14, 1956 he embraced Buddhism along with many of his followers. The same year he completed his last writing ‘Buddha and His Dharma’.

Dr. Ambedkar’s patriotism started with the upliftment of the downtrodden and the poor. He fought for their equality and rights. His ideas about patriotism were not only confined to the abolition of colonialism, but he also wanted freedom for every individual. For him freedom without equality, democracy and equality without freedom could lead to absolute dictatorship.

On 6th December 1956, Baba Saheb Dr. B.R. Ambedkar attained ‘Mahaparinirvan’.

Economic Democracy

According to Baba Saheb, the object of framing the Constitution is two-fold : (1) To lay down the form of political democracy, and (2) To lay down that our ideal is economic democracy and also to prescribe that every Government whatever is in power shall strive to bring about economic democracy. The directive principles have a great value, for they lay down that our ideal is economic democracy.

In 1990, Dr.B.R.Ambedkar, the chief architect of our Constitution, was bestowed with Bharat Ratna. The same year Dr. Ambedkar’s life size portrait was also unveiled in the Central Hall of Parliament. The period from 14th April 1990-14th April 1991 was observed as ‘Year of Social Justice’ in the memory of Babasaheb, the champion of the poor and the downtrodden.

The Horoscope of Mayawati

2011-09-10T04:33:00.000-07:00

Mayawati is the current Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India with about 190 million people living there. This state has given the maximum number of Prime Ministers to the country, yet it remains one of the most backward but politically most sensitive state in the Indian Union.

Mayawati was born into a middle class dalit (downtrodden) family of Uttar Pradesh. Her rise to the top of the most important state of India is a testimony to overcoming the heaviest odds and achieving a phenomenal success. To begin with she had not one but three disadvantages. One is from dalit community, the Hindu outcasts who have been at the bottom of the social totem pole for at least centuries, if not millennia. Second, she is a woman. Third, she had absolutely no lineage in politics to speak of. She is also a totally home-grown phenomenon, having never attended any school or university outside the country. In the toxic political water infested with predators of all kinds, shapes and sizes, she has not only survived but also thrived.

Mayawati was born on the 15th January 1956 in Delhi, her horoscope reads as follows: Ascendant Capricorn, with the Sun, the Moon, and Mercury in it; second housed, Aquarius with Venus posited in it; fifth house, Taurus with Ketu (dragon's tail) posited in it; eighth house, Leo with Jupiter placed in it; eleventh house, Scorpio, with three planets namely Saturn, Mars and Rahu (dragon's head) posited in it.

She is born into Sun Sign Capricorn, as per Western Fixed Zodiac. According to her sidereal chart, her ascendant, Sun and Moon Sign, is also Capricorn. This makes her a dyed-in-the-wool Capricorn, the sign that aspires to reach the top.

Linda Goodman had once expressed a desire to be reborn as a Capricorn, if it were possible. Moon the lord of the seventh angular house and Mercury, the lord of the ninth trinal house in the ascendant gives rise to an excellent ruling combination. The conjunction of Sun and Mercury is excellent creating what iscalled Budh-Aditya yoga in Sanskrit.

Venus, the most important planet and lord of fifth and tenth, trine and angle, is placed in the second house, having as aspect of Jupiter, thus making it absolutely powerful.

Jupiter, the lord of the two lean positions viz. third and twelfth houses is in the eighth giving rise to another reverse ruling combination.

Presence of the ascendant lord in the eleventh aspecting the ascendant is also first rate. Mars, the lord of the fourth and eleventh in eleventh is fantastic and its combination with ascendant lord is leaves no room for doubt for the rise of the native. The paeans of praise can go on and on because there are so many combinations lending power to the chart.

Presence of New Moon, seventh lord, in ascendant explains her single, unmarried status. Ketu in the fifth aspected by three natural malefics in eleventh means no children. However, Venus in the second house of family means being head of the millions followers forming a family.

After Mayawati's success in politics, no person worth the salt can say that s/he could not achieve success because of deficiency in the social background. Her rise is an uprise against poverty, social injustice and gender discrimination.

HAMARI JAAN BEHAN MAYAWATI

2011-06-28T00:25:00.000-07:00

BSP

2011-06-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

MAYAWATI AND POLITICAL GAMES IN INDIA

2011-06-28T00:20:00.000-07:00

Mayawati announces new land acquisition policy

2011-06-25T05:51:00.001-07:00

Mayawati, A Dalit Icon

2011-03-18T00:22:00.000-07:00

Mayawati was born into a middle class dalit (downtrodden) family of Uttar Pradesh. Her rise to the top of the most important state of India is a testimony to overcoming the heaviest odds and achieving a phenomenal success. To begin with she had not one but three disadvantages. One is from dalit community, the Hindu outcasts who have been at the bottom of the social totem pole for at least centuries, if not millennia. Second, she is a woman. Third, she had absolutely no lineage in politics to speak of. She is also a totally home-grown phenomenon, having never attended any school or university outside the country. In the toxic political water infested with predators of all kinds, shapes and sizes, she has not only survived but also thrived.

Mayawati was born on the 15th January 1956 in Delhi, her horoscope reads as follows: Ascendant Capricorn, with the Sun, the Moon, and Mercury in it; second housed, Aquarius with Venus posited in it; fifth house, Taurus with Ketu (dragon's tail) posited in it; eighth house, Leo with Jupiter placed in it; eleventh house, Scorpio, with three planets namely Saturn, Mars and Rahu (dragon's head) posited in it.

She is born into Sun Sign Capricorn, as per Western Fixed Zodiac. According to her sidereal chart, her ascendant, Sun and Moon Sign, is also Capricorn. This makes her a dyed-in-the-wool Capricorn, the sign that aspires to reach the top.

Linda Goodman had once expressed a desire to be reborn as a Capricorn, if it were possible. Moon the lord of the seventh angular house and Mercury, the lord of the ninth trinal house in the ascendant gives rise to an excellent ruling combination. The conjunction of Sun and Mercury is excellent creating what iscalled Budh-Aditya yoga in Sanskrit.

Venus, the most important planet and lord of fifth and tenth, trine and angle, is placed in the second house, having as aspect of Jupiter, thus making it absolutely powerful.

Jupiter, the lord of the two lean positions viz. third and twelfth houses is in the eighth giving rise to another reverse ruling combination.

Presence of the ascendant lord in the eleventh aspecting the ascendant is also first rate. Mars, the lord of the fourth and eleventh in eleventh is fantastic and its combination with ascendant lord is leaves no room for doubt for the rise of the native. The paeans of praise can go on and on because there are so many combinations lending power to the chart.

Presence of New Moon, seventh lord, in ascendant explains her single, unmarried status. Ketu in the fifth aspected by three natural malefics in eleventh means no children. However, Venus in the second house of family means being head of the millions followers forming a family.

After Mayawati's success in politics, no person worth the salt can say that s/he could not achieve success because of deficiency in the social background. Her rise is an uprise against poverty, social injustice and gender discrimination.

Prince of Congress Vs Dalit ki Beti

2011-03-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

From last couple of years politics in UP is witnessing a new controversy. 'Prince of Congress', Rahul Gandhi is at a loggerhead with 'Dalit ki Beti, Mayawati. This battle till date has achieved good returns for the media. Market players have a self interest in pushing this battle and making it more intense as it is increasing their revenues and without going deep into the problems of the deprived sections. The high profile visits by two political heavyweights to forgotten places of modern India bring pity picture of our democracy. After sixty years of independence it a matter of shame that a section of our citizens is living in plight and distress. A night stay in a hut of a dalit woman is not going to change anything in this nation except some applaud by their respective courtiers who anyway will clap on whatever the duo will do.

Let ask a simple and straight question from the Price of Congress as why these huts are still visible in India although his family ruled this nation for more than forty years and the ruling alliance is still headed by his party. Where has gone the much published, propagated, and cherished concept of 'Socialism' introduced by no other than his grandmother late Mrs. Indira Gandhi. The Congress government of 1990's opened India economy for sale because they were of the view that There is No Alternative (TINA) and the present misery of India people are much to do with the blind economic liberalization followed by subsequent Indian governments. It is not that any downward trend in subsistence level of Dalit is witnessed only in the state of UP, it is everywhere even in the Congress ruled states. Why this favoritism by the much glorified Prince of Congress who in his late thirties is interested to known what this nation is all about by his 'Bharat Darshan'. I hope that he had read 'Discovery of India' written by none other than Pt. Nehru or else he has to do a bachelor course in Indian history. Prince is silent on the rising prices of essential commodities which are directly linked with the day to day life of the common man and making their life harder to live. Even our past kings used to go for 'Jan Yatras' to take the account of public life so if Rahul Gandhi is roaming or doing road shows all over the nation then he is only following the footsteps of our ancient Indian rulers. The pathetic condition of Indian people can be gauzed if one just had followed the farmer's suicide in last one decade. Vidharbha region is an existing morgue where every week farmers are committing suicides what the Prince has to say on the condition of this region which is in boundary of the state ruled by his own party.

On the other hand Mayawati, once leader of crusade against 'Manuwad' is talking of 'Sarwa Samaj' and Brahaman Samaj is now the frontrunner in all her campaign of caste reconciliation. Still Bahujan Samaj Party should be credited with leading the fight of social justice in UP, and for ensuring respect for the Dalit community in the society. Although, the present policy of BSP is not different from other state governments who had accepted neo-liberal policy as a fate accompli and are hardly worried about the social security of individuals. The present policy is not going to bring any substantial change in the living standard of those who are put on the sidelines by this irrational pace of market economy. The father of Indian constitution Baba Saheb Ambedkar has rightly observed that political equality is necessary but without economic equality the desired change will not be achieved in the society. The question of economic equality is the core of social transformation in this country and nothing substantial can be achieved without bringing economic equality in the society. Unfortunately the social engineering for electoral gains has nothing to do with the economic transformation of the society and will only maintain the status quo. Forget about the policies, it is much of surprise that Mayawati is not willing to believe that anyone other than her can talk of deprived section in UP. This is undemocratic and anybody from the Prince of Congress to a common man, anyone can raise the finger on Mayawati as far as issues of downtrodden are concerned. This is undemocratic and everybody has an equal right to question, every government is accountable towards the people in a democracy.

Infact both the approaches have its own fallacies and are inadequate to deal with the real issues of the people. A complete social revolution is the only way to bring desired change and equality in the society. The media covered expeditions are not the solution except in improving the personal rating of individual leaders. Hope both Mayawati and Rahul will understand this simple fact and work in and outside their party to bring cheer of the face of real India.

Maya Magic

2010-09-30T00:54:00.000-07:00

Rahul Gandhi,BJP,SP and others are trying hard to reduce "Maya Magic" but despite being cornered from every quarter,Mayawati is getting stronger and stronger,Politically.If Barrack Obama can become the president of the USA then who can stop Mayawati if the electorate of this country want to elevate her to the highest seat of power?

Mayawati:The Change Agent

2010-03-30T00:09:00.000-07:00

Mayawati has become a subject of derision and urban intellectuals laugh at her ways heartily.For them Mayawati is very "Indian"and so lacks sophistication of the likes of Sonia Gandhi.Perhaps they will understand Mayawati when they will know that India is much more beyond than some urban cities and the views held by these "T.V. Intellectuals" have no meaning for the Mayawati and her politics.
As a matter of fact Mayawati is the only leader in the entire world sans some communist countries who has millions of fanatical supporters who are with her because of her persona and Politics.
These very people accuses her of corruption and inefficiency.They have forgotten that perhaps the last honest politician this country had was Lal Bahadur Shastri ?
Mayawati on the other hand should not get diverted away and concentrate upon the development.
The Ganga Expressway can change the UP so Mayawati should expedite the process and complete that in record time which will immortalise her for ever.

Mayawati to lodge nationwide protest against Women Reservation Bill

2010-03-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

In Uttar Pradesh ruling Bahujan Samaj Party president and state Chief Minister Mayawati announced to lodge nationwide protest against the Women Reservation Bill on 14th of next month.
Addressing a massive rally at Lucknow organised to celebrate silver jubilee celebrations of the party she said that the provisions in proposed bill are not beneficial to the women of minority, Dalit and Other Backward Classes.
Ms Mayawati came down heavily on the Congress for inflation spiral and said that her party would launch an aggressive country-wide agitation, if the prices were not controlled in the near future. She hit back at opposition parties specially Congress criticising her for installing her own statues and said law does not prevent anyone from erecting statues of living persons. Ms Mayawati blamed the opposition parties for trying to misguide the public by raising false charges of unnecessary expenditure on memorials and parks set up by her government in the names of Dalit icons.
Referring recent notice issued by the Election Commission to her party on statues of Elephant at parks and memorials set up by her government she said that there was a big conspiracy to seize her party symbol of elephant. Ms Mayawati made it clear that the statues of elephants were installed at various memorials and parks had posed different from as depicted in the party symbol.
In her one hour 30 minutes long speech she targeted the Congress. She said that Congress always conspired to destroy the BSP, which had already made its presence felt in the political arena in the country. She said that the Congress at the Centre may give step-motherly treatment to the state may strive to finish the BSP movement. The BSP supremo chose the occasion to announce setting up an All India Legal Cell of BSP to be headed by party general secretary Satish Chandra Mishra.

Rajya Sabha creates history; passes Women's Reservation Bill

2010-03-09T06:43:00.001-08:00

History was created today with the Rajya Sabha passing the Women's Reservation Bill with more than two thirds majority. Out of 187 members present in the House, 186 voted in support and one against the bill.

Intervening in the debate on the Bill which provides for 33 per cent reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies, the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh described it as a giant and historic step forward. Referring to the concerns about the rights of minorities, Dr. Singh said that the government recognizes that they have not got their due share. He said that the government is committed to their empowerment and the process has already begun.

in reference to: Bihar Samachar (view on Google Sidewiki)

BSP not to support Women's Reservation

2010-03-08T03:32:00.000-08:00

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati has written a letter to prime minister pointing out that the BSP was not against reservation to women, but the bill requires some necessary amendments," senior party leader Satish Chandra Mishra told reporters here.

He said the BSP favoured a separate quota for the SC/ST women within the 33 per cent reservation proposed in the bill.

"The chief minister has pointed out that women of all sections in general and SC/ST in particular were socio-economically backward and they were lagging far behind in the field of politics," he said.

"The CM in her letter had said that to make women politically strong it was necessary that women of all sections of the society should get benefit of reservation," Mishra said.

He said Mayawati was of the view that this could only be achieved when along with SC/ST women separate reservation was made for women belonging to backward, religious minority and economically weaker sections among the upper caste.

"The CM has requested the Prime Minister that the proposed bill should be tabled in Parliament after making amendments as per the intentions of the BSP and the UP government," he said.

Mayawati announces 264 new welfare schemes

2010-01-16T21:48:00.000-08:00

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Ms. Mayawati has announced 264 new welfare schemes worth 7,312 crore rupees. These schemes were launched at a function organised to mark her 54th birthday in Lucknow yesterday. The schemes include Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mahamaya Gharib Arthik Madad Yojana, under which beneficiary would be entitled to 300 rupees per month. A special cell has been created in Chief Minister's Secretariat for the implementation of these programmes. It will be directly monitored by the Chief Minister's Office. About 30 lakh poor families will benefit in the first year of the scheme.

Mayawati's brand of politics

2009-12-14T22:26:00.000-08:00

Mayawati's brand of politics has attracted attention of political observers far and wide.
In an article in the New York Times, Amy Waldman wrote in 2003: "

In a state where Dalits are nearly one quarter of the population, Ms. Mayawati has used caste as a mobilizer, building on a social and political revolution 50 years in the making. It is a phenomenon that has reshaped the politics of India."

Mayawati:The decline of a mass leader.

2009-12-08T02:19:00.000-08:00

Mayawati is a complex-ridden Dalit dictator. Her father is a typical poor villager who had a large family to feed and bring up.He struggled to make both ends meet. Mayawati is his beloved daughter who has succeeded in life beyond his wildest dream.Mayawati had dreams of becoming an IAS officer. She always dreamt big.Kanshi Ram spotted the fire in Mayawati. He advised her to become an activist, and work for the Dalit cause with missionary zeal.He saw her potential, and gradually moulded her into a leader of the Dalit masses.He explained to her the advantage of entering politics wherein he saw her controlling the masses and bringing about a better quality of life for oppressed Dalits all over India.She could consequently have immense 'control' over hundreds of IAS officers, he reassured her. She agreed and worked with single-minded devotion and commitment.Gradually, Kanshi Ram grew in strength and political stature. With him, also grew his team of dedicated workers. Mayawati led the pack.Mayawati was very effective and ruthless in implementing her mentor's plans and policies. Her dictatorial streak came in handy to crush unwanted opponents.Thousand upon thousands of Dalit masses traversed several miles on foot and rickety bicycles to listen to their hero Kanshi Ram.His disciple Mayawati was affectionately called behenji (sister) by one and all.They trusted the duo implicitly and pledged absolute loyalty to them.Kanshi Ram had sacrificed his family for the much larger, extended Indian Dalit family. Unmindful of his own comforts and health, he set records in cycling day and night and criss-crossing all over UP.Mayawati was extremely devoted to her mentor. She also worked long hours and, exhausted, she would often doze off in the party office.A time came when she started living in the same house with Kanshi Ram.The relationship was respected by the fond and indulgent Dalits who saw nothing objectionable in it. For them, Mayawati was their most respected behenji. Period.She was by her mentor's side as he lay dying in hospital. She nursed him and his Dalit constituency with single-minded devotion and ambition.After his death, behenji took over the Bahujan Samaj Party's reins. As in the past, she continued being in and out of the UP chief minister's chair.She had untrammelled sway and power over the Dalit masses. She was blindly trusted and their votes went to her BSP's 'Elephant' symbol in each election with increasing solidarity.During the 2007 assembly elections they voted her to power with a thumping majority. Newsweek even declared her as one of the most powerful women in the world.With a record of four terms as UP chief minister, shouldn't behenji start dreaming and seriously aspiring for the prime minister's chair?The Dalits cheered her all along the way and pledged unflinching support to their beloved leader. They identified themselves totally with her, and wished to see her installed as the first Dalit prime minister of India.This adulation and blind faith went to Mayawati's head. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts completely. She was no exception.Whereas the illiterate and trusting Dalit masses saw a future PM in their behenji, Mayawati saw a vote-bank in them.She also saw money in her Dalit vote bank.Born into deprivation, she is insecure where money is concerned and wants to grab it all. She is street smart, and knows how to collect it on one pretext or the other.Celebrating her birthday and using it as a valid excuse to demand expensive gifts of cash, gold, diamonds and platinum does not embarrass her.In fact, she enjoys flaunting her blue diamond rings to inspire other deprived Dalits to emulate her 'success story'.Spotting a new niche, and sensing the financial potential, behenji thought of converting her limited financial assets into assets.The Supreme Court and Central Bureau of Investigation may wonder how and why, but Mayawati thinks she can go on like this forever. The Congress is scheming to sting her shortly in the disproportionate assets case.Such assets were amassed possibly only when she apparently conceived and decided to auction her solid chunk of trusting Dalit votes to the most suitable bidder. Rather, than the most opportunist politician in exchange for her transferable Dalit vote bank during polls.Behenji shrewdly commoditised those Dalit votes. Indeed, in their helplessness, the Dalits now also find themselves hapless.They had been imperceptibly transformed into Dalit vote bank cheques without their consent by the magician Mayawati.They had trusted their beloved behenji and would never go back. Little did they suspect otherwise.She had cleverly exploited this Dalit herd and bartered it away for petty power and pelf.Overnight, behenji has metamorphosed into a madame.Mayawati's role model, Indira Gandhi, hated to be addressed as 'madame'. But Mayawati gloats over the fact that she has graduated from an ordinary behenji into 'madame'.Nowadays everyone in UP from the IAS down to the chowk ruffians refer to behenji as 'madame'.How long the captive Dalits will reconcile with their tragedy is anybody's guess.
Nazarwala:Rediff.com

Ganga Expressways

2009-12-02T01:15:00.000-08:00

Those who are seeking political motives behind the Ganga Expressways are doing disservice to millions of people of Uttar Pradesh.This expressways has the potential to catapult UP among the most developed states of India.Many good-for-nothing-politicians are averse that Mayawati too would gain iconic status along with this expressways.So there is widespread conspiracy to stall this anyhow.Once the court gives its directive and go ahead then Mayawati should give this the highest priority and meet the schedule somehow.

Historic initiatives taken by Mayawati

2009-11-27T03:33:00.000-08:00

This is very unfortunate that the historic initiatives taken by the Mayawati is not appreciated as much as it deserves.Unlike Mulayam Singh and Lalu Prashad Yadav ,Mayawati pushed for infrastructure development which once competed would change the face of Uttar Pradesh.The Taj Corridor and the Ganga Expressway would catapult UP to another zone.And fearing that Mayawati will be immortalise if these projects are completed,several obstacles are deliberately put forward to discourage her.But Mayawati has shown her steely nerve and hopefully would emerge triumphed eventually-bringing all round prosperity in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Mayawati has sprung a surprise once again

2009-11-10T22:03:00.000-08:00

When people had started talking about the declinig influence of Mayawati and her Bahujan Samaj Party;she has sprung a surprise once again by winning majority of seats in the by polls held recently.Mayawati has done spectacularly well.It seems that the repeated warnings by courts and other quarters over her penchant for Parks have benefited her immensely.
Congress has also done well but the biggest disappointment this result has been for Samajwadi Party which could not retain its earier seats and failed to win any.It seems that Muslim voters have deserted it now and are supporting the congress.

Mayawati...Mayawati.......Mayawati

2009-02-20T06:26:00.000-08:00

Mayawati,the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh has now set her eyes on Delhi.She has spelt her intention in no uncertain terms and has started fine tuning her strategy .As per a survey ,Mayawati would grab more than 40 Parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh alone.That is not significant considering her sweeping success in the Assembly election.Mayawati realises that no no party would be able to form the government without her support,considering the present political alignment.She seems to be aware of this and is gearing up to exploit the situation to her advantage.A few years ago it would have been labeled as her hallucination to be the Prime Minister of India,but not now,considering the state of affairs of the National Parties.It is altogether a different matter how her ascendancy will affect India's march towards prosperity and its rightful place among the developed nations of the world.

Mayawati is also tryng to replicate her success formula in other states .She has started to woo Brahmin's in Maharashtra.Next on the list are minorities,especially muslims.Considering the disarray in the Samajwadi Party,she his hopeful of making a dent in that community too.According to the survey,the Rashtriya Janta Dal of Lalu Prashad Yadav would be wiped out from Bihar this time;So will be the Lok Jan Shakti of Ram Vilas Paswan.That survey also indicated that Narendra Modi would improve upon his tally.But in the all India scenario, Congress would emerge as the biggest beneficiary but it can't cross the 225 mark .So the support of Mayawati would be crucial to form the government.

The position of Left in Kerala is very precarious and it will loose there heavily .The same can happen in West Bengal too,if Mamta Banerjee joins hands with Congress.The supporters of BJP are dismayed over its double-speak and the way it dithered to support the Indo-US Nuclear deal which is very important for the country.It will suffer most because its voters are relatively literate and aware of the International affairs.Kapil Sibbal,the Science and Environment minister very aptly described that the "BJP has kissed death".

These political developments do not auger well for India as everybody knows how these regional leaders have conducted themselves in the past.They have grabbed their position by promising the most downtrodden segments of our society a better future. While they have managed to amass unbelievable fortune for themselves leaving the masses to remain in perpetual poverty.Perhaps politicians like Mayawati would like to change that perception.Her effort to beautify Varanshi is praisworthy and shows that she has the insight and vision.

Historic Initiatives By Mayawati

2008-10-26T01:25:00.000-07:00

The one decision to construct Greater Noida-Balia Expressway by Mayawati Government can change the entire landscape of Uttar Pradesh.Despite being embroiled in Taj Expressway controversy for years,Mayawati's thought about this mammoth project,only exemplifies her hidden developmental streak.Nobody even dared to think about this earlier but Mayawati not only conceptualised this and hopefully, will be able to complete in time also.

Had the central government taken such imitative then the state selected would have been either any southern state or north-western state.U.P andBihar come last in the reckoning, always.

This is more significant for the simple reason that a state chief minister has taken initiative of her own and if other chief ministers also follow her, then, the infrastructure woes of the country will be greatly reduced quickly.Nobody knows how much time National Highways Authority of India,NHAI, will take to provide better motorable roads to the citizens of this country.

As the U.P and Bihar have non-UPA governments,it would deliberately not speed up construction activities due to internal pressure.The condition of roads in U.P is not bad but it is far worse inBihar, mainly because of NHAI apathy.NHAI never bothers to repair even existing National Highways. So, constructing newer ones is asking for far too much.It is the state government ofBihar which is managing even NHAI roads.The reasons for NHAI's discriminatory attitude is known to everyone.Under the pressure of Rashtriya Janta Dal,NRJD, NHAI is skirting its responsibility.RJD,would obviously not want to see the contrasting picture under Nitish Kumar Government.Under its 16 years rule, RJD had ensured that no stretch of road remained motorable, so that Charwaha vidyalayas and bullock-cart transportation could be popularised.Nitish Kumar has constructed most of the state highways and peripheral roads but NHAI has ensured that the National Highways remain in such condition that deter any one from travelling on that path.

The proposed Expressways will pass through many ancient Pilgrimage centers.Travelling between Delhi-Kanpur,Kanpur-Allahabad,Allahabad-Varanasi would become a breeze and millions of reluctant people will finally start visiting the most sacred places on this earth.There will be all round developmental activities and millions of employment opportunities would be generated.

Mayawati has tremendous hold over bureaucracy and she is most likely to achieve this ambitious feat ,but politicians are already roaming with open daggers in their hands.They are most likely to stab from behind at the very first opportunity they get.LikeRJD of Bihar they would never like to see Mayawati as a chief minister who transformed U.P of her very own will.

If U.P. and Bihar have to come out of the rut then the respective state governments have to take bold and path braking initiatives.Bundelkhand has been facing famine for years now but no concrete measures were taken to improve the situation.Similarly,Kosi has been flooding a large part of Bihar but no measures to provide some solace to the victims were ever tried.One or two trains for Bihar announced by railway minister invites widespread derision and criticism but they fail to appreciate how this state has been overlooked for decades.

There are many aspects of Mayawati which can be debated and criticised but she should also be praised for what is due to her and this she deserves completely.

Mayawati:the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh

2008-08-15T05:35:00.000-07:00

Mayawati,the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh has now set her eyes on Delhi.She has spelt her intention in no uncertain terms and has started fine tuning her strategy .The lady luck is also smiling on her and after the Confidence vote fiasco,she is the undisputed leader of any kind of third front or any other political combination.

Mayawati would be emboldened to know that no party would be able to form the government without her support,considering the present political alignment.She seems to be aware of this and is gearing up to exploit the situation to her advantage.A few years ago it would have been labeled as "her hallucination" to be the Prime Minister of India,but not now,considering the state of affairs of the National Parties.It is altogether a different matter how her ascendancy will affect India's march towards prosperity and its rightful place among developed nations of the world.

Mayawati is also tryng to replicate her success formula in other states .She has started to woo Brahmin's in Maharashtra.Next on the list are minorities,especially muslims.Considering the disarray in the Samajwadi Party,she his hopeful of making a dent in that community too.She has given the Central Government the ultimatum to implement reservation in Private sector.So,she hopes to benefit from that account as well.According to the survey,the Rashtriya Janta Dal of Lalu Prashad Yadav would be wiped out from Bihar this time;So will be the Lok Jan Shakti of Ram Vilas Paswan.But in the all India scenario, Congress would emerge as the biggest beneficiary but it can't cross the 225 mark .So the support of Mayawati would be crucial to form the government.
The position of Left in Kerala is very precarious and it will loose there heavily .The same can happen in West Bengal too,if Mamta Banerjee joins hands with Congress.Bhartiya Janta Party will be sidelined after its shameful stance over the Nuclear Deal now.The supporters of BJP are dismayed over its double-speak and the way it has dithered to support the Indo-US Nuclear deal which is very important for the country.It will suffer most because its voters are relatively literate and aware of the International affairs.Kapil Sibbal,the Science and Environment minister very aptly described that the "BJP has kissed death".
These political developments do not auger well for India as everybody knows how these regional leaders have conducted themselves in the past.They have grabbed their position by promising the most downtrodden segments of our society a better future. While they have managed to amass unbelievable fortune for themselves,the masses remain in perpetual poverty.Perhaps politicians like Mayawati would like to maintain their status quo,forever.

The surprising durability of the Bahujana Samaj Party

2008-08-04T06:01:00.000-07:00

The surprising durability of the Bahujana Samaj Party

Kanshi Ram: from BAMCEF to the Bahujana Samaj Party

The Ambedkarites and the Dalits after Ambedkar

2008-08-04T05:56:00.000-07:00

The Ambedkarites and the Dalits after Ambedkar

Untouchable politics during the era of Congress dominance

Kanshi Ram, campaigner for the rights of India’s Dalits.

2008-08-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

Kanshi Ram, campaigner for the rights of India’s Dalits.

The new Dalit politics of north India

Kanshi Ram, campaigner for the rights of India’s Dalits.

2008-05-26T01:04:00.000-07:00

He was himself an untouchable, from Punjab, although he was one of the lucky few of his generation to enjoy a relatively privileged background. He was thus spared most of the overt discrimination meted out to others of similar low birth and was an adult before personally experiencing caste bigotry. From that moment his life had a mission.
Untouchables were traditionally limited to livelihoods that dealt with death — collecting corpses, for example — and excrement, or handling a polluting material like leather. Dalits still face day-to-day discrimination, especially in rural areas, but it is no longer institutionalised. That is because of the political awakening brought about by Kanshi Ram, who gave Dalits the confidence and means to fight 5,000 years of caste prejudice.
About 150 million Indians are Dalits. In northern Hindu heartland states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar their numbers were always high enough to make them, potentially, a political force, but they lacked unity and leadership. Until Kanshi Ram came along they were easily intimidated, divided and exploited by higher-caste politicians determined to protect a system that secured their relatively privileged status.
He founded his Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) on April 13, 1984, the birthday of B. R. Ambedkar, the late untouchable leader who rose against formidable odds to become a leading jurist and chief architect of the Indian constitution. Kanshi Ram saw himself as a disciple of Ambedkar, although he did not follow his example of converting to Buddhism to escape caste. He did, however, share every Dalit’s loathing of the caste system.
To that extent he challenged Hinduism itself, bringing him and his organisation into direct conflict with the highest of the high castes, the priestly Brahmins. Kanshi Ram spent much of his political life raging against Brahminism and at one time his movement exhorted Dalits to beat Brahmins with shoes made of cow leather. That would have represented a terrible pollution for a devout Brahmin.
Kanshi Ram, along with most other Dalits, was no lover of Mahatma Gandhi. He would complain that, while Gandhi condemned caste discrimination, he never actually fought the caste system nor challenged its legitimacy as a cornerstone of Hinduism. Dalits loathed what they regarded as his patronising word for them: Harijans, meaning “children of God”. The term is no longer part of India’s political vocabulary.
The Bahujan Samaj Party became the most successful Dalit political formation of its era. It sought to extend its appeal from a simple Dalit constituency into the febrile political area of the so-called backward castes, as well as appealing to Muslims, who are about 12 per cent of the population and mostly as poor as Dalits. Between them Dalits and backward castes make up more than 60 per cent of all Indians, but Kanshi Ram’s attempts at forming political alliances frequently foundered on ancient tensions between Dalits and their most immediate day-to-day oppressors — those marginally higher than them in the caste order.
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It is a measure of how the outcastes and low castes were repressed that even in Uttar Pradesh, where they are in a substantial majority, every chief minister for the first 40 years of independence belonged to an upper caste. It was in that state that Kanshi Ram had his greatest triumph, when for the first time a Dalit — a 39-year-old woman, Mayawati Kumari, who was his protégé — became chief minister in 1995. She was soon ousted, but Dalits had now come decisively of political age.
With her triumph Dalits knew they would never again suffer the worst humiliations of the not-too-distant past. It had been common practice for higher castes to inflict humiliating restrictions on the lives of untouchables — by, for example, prohibiting a groom from riding to his wedding on horseback or, as happened occasionally, forcing an untouchable bride to spend a night with upper-caste men. Dalits always lived — and mostly still do live — in separate sections of villages, making them easy prey if any of their number became too assertive.
Paradoxically, Kanshi Ram ended up doing deals with the upper-caste Bharatiya Janata Party — heavily supported by Brahmins — out of political expediency.
Brahmins and Dalits would appear on political platforms together, improbably extolling similar political ideologies and promising to end thousands of years of caste conflict between them. Mayawati was once greeted on a stage with full Brahminical rituals and the chanting of Vedic hymns.
To purist Brahmins this was sacrilege. To an ageing Kanshi Ram it was a public demonstration of the unprecedented changes he had helped to create — as well as being a means to political power. The very party that had risen to prominence on a platform of abusing Brahmins was now sharing political platforms with them. On several occasions his party headed state governments in Uttar Pradesh, although they were often short-lived. In the 1999 general elections it captured an impressive 14 parliamentary seats, confirming the Dalits’ arrival as a powerful voting force that was in nobody else’s pocket. Until now their only real political voice — and a feeble one — had been the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi, which millions of Dalits were happy to abandon.
Kanshi Ram had personally escaped the normal fate of Dalits due to an early, limited system of educational reservations for low castes, and gained a degree from the Government College at Ropar, Punjab. He then became a bureaucrat but turned to political activism after attempts were made to abolish a holiday commemorating Ambedkar’s birthday.
This, he later recalled, brought him personally face-to-face with upper-caste bigotry. In 1970 he formed the All India Backward and Minority Employees’ Federation, which took its slogan directly from Ambedkar’s frequent exhortation to the untouchables: “Educate, organise, agitate.” This was eventually abandoned in favour of forming his more overtly political Bahujan Samaj Party, today the leading political champion of Dalits in the Hindu heartland.
He was unmarried.

Kanshi Ram and Mayawati

2008-05-26T00:57:00.000-07:00

Our middle-class discourse manufacturers tend to judge — and judge harshly — Kanshi Ram by Mayawati, her presumed character flaws and political frailties. Some are even prone to regard Ms. Mayawati as the very anti-thesis of the Kanshi Ram legacy and an epitaph for his ultimate failure. Irrespective of whether or not Ms. Mayawati is able to sustain the Bahujan Samaj Party as the instrument of the marginalised Dalits, history will judge Kanshi Ram as much a sustainer of the Indian state as was the original constitutionalist, Babasaheb Ambedkar. If Dr. Ambedkar can be credited with putting in place a constitutional edifice for the Indian state, it was Kanshi Ram whose organisational devices and political stratagems ended up shoring up the democratic legitimacy of the state system, that too at a time when anti-democratic forces had mounted an offensive against the egalitarian order.
It needs to be recalled that Kanshi Ram did not register his first substantial electoral victory till 1993 — in the Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Sabha election when the BSP won 66 of the 162 seats it contested (in alliance with the Samajwadi Party). Since then the party has gone places. This is in sharp contrast with its three earlier electoral innings. In the 1984 Lok Sabha elections, the BSP drew a blank; in 1989 it won only two seats; and in 1991 it had to be content with just one seat. Yet within a space of 30 months, Kanshi Ram and his party became consequential players in the political scheme of things.
So, what happened in India between 1991 and 1993 that helped Kanshi Ram gain traction? Two seminal developments forced a re-alignment of forces and ideas. First, in New Delhi, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao gave the go-ahead to Dr. Manmohan Singh to put in place a new economic order. The new regime, for better or for the worse, was anchored on a premise that the Indian state must turn its back on the masses, and that the polity must reverse the 30-year-old experiment in populism, and that the decision-makers must hitch their policy wagon to distant investors, creditors, and chambers of commerce. Suddenly, the very matrix of democratic legitimacy and popular accountability was being redefined — to the disadvantage of vast sections of Indian society.
The second development that helped Kanshi Ram become relevant was the sangh parivar's assault on the secular order. The assault began when Mr. Advani set out on his rath yatra from Somnath in 1990 and culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. More than the destruction of a medieval mosque, the sangh parivar was out to roll back the Ambedkarite constitutional order, with its promise of a place for everyone under the Indian democratic sun. Assorted sadhus, mahants, and shankaracharyas were sought to be elevated to the status of arbiters of our collective destiny. The Hindutva juggernaut was meant to use the democratic space to hijack the Indian polity away from large segments, especially the vulnerable and the marginalised.
Crisis of legitimacy
The twin agenda — of economic reforms in New Delhi and of the Ram temple in Ayodhya — triggered a crisis of democratic legitimacy for the Indian state. The Congress, the party of economic reforms, was unable to connect with the masses and was soon rebuffed by the voters in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. But that was in October 1994; before that the sangh parivar's challenge had to be met in Uttar Pradesh, the site of the medieval animosities that Mr. Advani insisted had to be addressed. This was a dark moment for democratic India. And, it was in this hour of crisis that Kanshi Ram forged as an alliance with the Samajwadi Party to deny the Bharatiya Janata Party power in Uttar Pradesh. Had the BJP been able to come back to power in the State after the vandalism at Ayodhya, its national leadership would have seen it as a licence to try to dismantle the secular constitutional order.
It is almost impossible to discern with any degree of confidence Kanshi Ram's calculus, in 1993 or later. May be it was nothing loftier than plain, simple electoral calculations that prompted the BSP leader to join hands with Mulayam Singh Yadav (or subsequently with the Congress or with the BJP, the two parties he regularly denounced as manuvadi outfits). But the ultimate outcome of his or Ms. Mayawati's (much maligned) "opportunism" was that the Dalits stood co-opted as partners in democratic India. It is perhaps no coincidence that the arrival of Ms. Mayawati as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh at the very young age of 35 paralleled the rise of the Sushmita Sen/Aishwarya Rai phenomenon. Beautiful India could not rise and sustain itself without the advent of Dalit India that Kanshi Ram plotted.
That he twice allowed Ms. Mayawati to team up with the BJP in no way detracts from the judgment that he helped clamp down on extremist Hindutva. True, like its other allies, the BSP too helped the BJP gain power and sustainability at the Centre; but it is equally true that, like the BJP's other allies, the BSP not only diluted the sangh parivar's fundamentalist impulses, it also extracted its pound of flesh in terms of respectability and acceptance. That the Vajpayee-Advani duo was reduced to countenancing all the excesses (political or personal) that Ms. Mayawati is accused of having committed only added to the BJP's ordinariness. The strategy of political accommodation the Vajpayee-Advani team put in place to prevent the BSP's defection to the "secular" camp only ended up eroding the BJP's claims to a different political morality. The only time the BSP-BJP alliance took on an unhealthy hue was when Ms. Mayawati decided to align with Narendra Modi after the 2002 anti-Muslim riots. Otherwise, on balance, the BSP helped tame the Hindutva crowd.
Whatever exasperation or disdain the middle-class discourse mongers may exhibit towards Ms. Mayawati and her penchant for a non-Dalit lifestyle, the fact remains that the BSP's electoral successes and aura of political indispensability have deepened the efficacy of Indian democracy. The net result of all the experimentation and innovation Kanshi Ram has shown is that the Dalits too have a chance of reasonable returns, in terms of prestige, position, patronage, and power. This message of reassurance has facilitated the rise and rise of consumerist India, without inviting any violent backlash from the lowest strata.
In the era of economic reforms — including when India was supposed to be shining — the Indian social order has become more unequal and less tolerant. The state system is finding it increasingly difficult to make the dissatisfied as well as the ambitious believe in its fairness; the political processes are no longer able to connect with the masses, inducing a crisis of governability. This, in the long run, is bound to produce a crisis of legitimacy. The very success that Kanshi Ram's BSP has been able to notch up helps the political system recover some of its popular acceptability.
The Dalits remain the only "ethnic" group in India that has not experimented with the idiom of violence; nor have they challenged the constitutional arrangement. Violence against the state or against other ethnic groups is an everyday phenomenon in India. Many extremist groups have tried to enlist the Dalits in their "struggles" against the Indian state but rarely do we hear of the Dalits arming themselves. Instead, Kanshi Ram's BSP is a potent advertisement that numbers, not violence, work in democratic India. No mean achievement, and for this alone modern India needs to be thankful to Kanshi Ram.

The new Dalit politics of north India

2008-05-26T00:54:00.000-07:00

North Indian politics are presently in a state of great flux. Whereas the Hindi-speaking region was once the basis of Congress rule of the nation, now the Congress vote has quite disintegrated there. Uttar Pradesh is the most dramatic case. In the general election of 1984 Congress won eighty-three out of eighty-five UP seats with 5 per cent of the total vote. But five years later the party won only fifteen seats with 32 per cent of the vote. In 1991 the Congress vote slipped further to 18 per cent, and it won five seats. This was also its tally of seats in 1996. Congress' dominance had been built on a strong command of the Brahmin, Muslim and Untouchable 'vote banks', together with considerable but variable support from the other upper castes and also the Backward Castes. The latter were the first to desert the party, and since the mid-eighties it has also suffered the fatal blow of having lost its three stable vote banks.
The waning of Congress has coincided with the rise of two other parties - the Janata Dal and its offshoots, including Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi Party, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). These parties have risen to prominence partly because of the vacuum caused by the waning of Congress, and partly because of their own attractiveness. Thus the leading party in 1989 was Janata Dal, with fifty-four seats and 36 per cent of the vote. But in the next election of 1991 the largest party was the BJP with fifty-one seats and 33 per cent of the vote. The Janata Dal and the Samajwadi Party draw their major strength from the Backward Castes, whereas the BJP has traditionally been strongest among the upper castes of the towns. But each of these two political forces picked up other groups as they gathered momentum. Thus the Janata Dal and Samajwadi parties attracted a large share of the Muslim vote disenchanted with Congress after the destruction of the Babri Masjid. And the BJP has picked up considerable Backward Caste support, partly because it has had a strong Backward Caste (Lodhi) leader in Kalyan Singh.
Another development of the first importance in Uttar Pradesh has been the rise of Kanshi Ram's Bahujana Samaj Party to the point where it was able to form the State government in 1995 and 1997. Although Kanshi Ram has benefited crucially from the collapse of Congress, his rise is not to be attributed simply to the vacuum effect. Kanshi Ram has spoken directly to the aspirations of the Chamars, and he has also had a radical-ising impact on a wider constituency of Backward and other Scheduled Caste communities. Kanshi Ram's mode of operation has been to yoke an aggressive Ambedkarite ideology to hard-headed manipulation of the vote banks of Uttar Pradesh. The indispensable basis of his power is his own community, the Chamars. These constitute not only the largest Untouchable caste in India, but almost certainly the largest single caste in Uttar Pradesh.'
Kanshi Ram has not had the total support of the Chamars - until recently the Jatavs of western UP have been an important hold-out - but his command in eastern UP has been overwhelming. Kanshi Ram's strategy has been to join his bank of Chamar voters to other Scheduled Caste and Backward Caste voters (particularly the Kurmis) and also the Muslims. He has been careful to cede the non-Chamar com-munities a majority of Bahujana Samaj candidates - there has been a spe-cially large number of Muslim candidates - in the knowledge that voters will often be attracted by a candidate of their own community. The Bahujana Samaj could offer these communities the prospect that the large Chamar vote would be added to theirs, since the Chamars believed that the party was above all theirs. But before we consider the contempo-rary situation in some detail, something must be said about the origins of Kanshi Ram and the Bahujana Samaj Party.

The Ambedkarites and the Dalits after Ambedkar

2008-05-26T00:52:00.000-07:00

Until the recent emergence of the Bahujana Samaj Party, the only post-Independence example of a party centred on Untouchables was the Republican Party of India (RPI). This was the final political vehicle devised by Ambedkar, though its formation in reached fruition only some months after his death. The Republican Party was a transformation of the Scheduled Castes Federation, electorally unsuccessful and also judged to be an inappropriate organisational form for Buddhists who had sloughed off caste by the act of abandoning Hinduism.8 Again, as in the days of the Independent Labour Party, Ambedkar planned a party along class rather than caste lines. But almost from the beginning the RPI ran into ideological, organisational and factional problems. The first major division was between an old guard more deeply rooted in the village world of the majority of Mahars, and a younger and more highly educated lead-ership that increasingly focussed on the opportunities inherent in urban life and the scheme of compensatory discrimination. This generational conflict was connected to a split between those who saw the future of Mahar politics in terms of broader economic and class struggle - some of these were the older village-based activists - and an emerging leadership less committed to working with caste Hindus and even other Untouchable communities. While Ambedkar himself had been far less concerned with agrarian problems than with broader questions of political and constitu-tional principle, his stature had been such as to engender loyalty right across Mahar society and thus to blur the divergence of interest within it. After Ambedkar, and in the context of growing social and economic diver-sity among the Mahars, there was no one who could command this general loyalty. By 1959 division in the RPI was so deep that the two major factions held separate conventions . Inevitably it was the younger, better-educated and more prosperous faction based in the cities that became the more energetic element of the party.

The RPI carried its divisions into the election of 1962, and failed to win a single Lok Sabha seat from the new linguistic state of Maharashtra.' It did somewhat better in the State Assembly election of that year, but after that it won only a handful of Assembly seats in Maharashtra. The RPI also put down roots in several States where Atnbedkar's influence had been relatively strong - particularly Uttar Pradesh (notably the cities of Agra and Aligarh) and Punjab, but also Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Extraordinarily, the RPI was electorally more successful in Uttar Pradesh than in Maharashtra. Its success in UP was built around a substantial Buddhist politician of Chamar origins, B. P. Maurya, who drew votes away from Congress by engineering a local coalition of Untouchables and Muslims in the city and District of Aligarh. But the inherent instability of this alliance - there had been no historical sympa-thy between Chamars and Muslims - and the Congress split of 1969 quickly changed the electoral equation for the RPI in Uttar Pradesh. By 1971 B. P. Maurya and his major opponent within the party, Ramji Ram, were both returned to the Lok Sabha under the banner of Indira Gandhi's ostensibly left-orientated branch of the Congress. This was the effective end of the Republican Party as a force in Uttar Pradesh.
In Maharashtra, the death or eclipse of one Ambedkarite form has been a prelude to the rise of another. Thus in the early 1970 an organisation calling itself the Dalit Panthers was formed with the project of reinstating class-based Dalit politics following the Republican Party's perceived lapse into narrow self-interest . The name, with its insurrectionist symbolism, was borrowed from the Black Panthers of the United States. At the time India was marked by widespread famine, per-vasive student activism and a non-party oppositional politics which later developed into Jayaprakash Narayan's direct confrontation of Indira Gandhi. But the Dalit Panthers proved unable to connect up with broader leftist politics. They were also no more attuned to the Dalit 'masses' - a majority of Mahars were still illiterate villagers - than was the Republican Party, and within a couple of years they were even more riven by ideological and personality differences. The core ideological split was publicly evident by 1974 and was personified in the two pre-eminent leaders of the movement, Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale.
For Dhale's faction, the defining moment in Dalit history was the mass conversion to Buddhism under the leadership of Ambedkar; future gains were to be made primarily through a deepening and widening of Buddhist consciousness rather than through secular political action. Namdeo Dhasal, on the other hand, represented a more orthodox leftist, indeed Marxist, position, which gave both Ambedkar and the conversion move-ment less of a defining role. Abolition of Untouchability was an issue of class and economics more than of caste, religion and consciousness, and the natural allies of the Untouchables were the poor classes of whatever religious or caste community. Consistent with this view Dhasal had seen the CPI as the appropriate overall leader of the Dalits. But within a few years Indira Gandhi's anti-poverty programs of the Emergency period persuaded Dhasal that here was a leader genuinely committed to the poor, and his faction supported Congress in the 1977 election. By then the Panthers were divided into a number of geographically centred fac-tions of little potency, and it was only the riots in 1978 surrounding the Maharashtra Government's decision to add the prefix 'Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar' to 'Marathwada University' that brought them into some prominence again. The Dalit Panthers had failed to define a durable role for themselves - they were political activists without a political party or a clear strategy agreed among themselves. Moreover, they had become scarcely more radical, and certainly no more connected to ordinary Mahars, than the Republican Party. And, of course, they had demon-strated little capacity to reach out to other Untouchable castes.
The void left by the demise of the Panthers has been filled not by another party or other directly political organisation of the Mahar Daltts but, extraordinarily, by a literary movement. A whole new literature has sprung up on the common basis of rejection of varna. The lives and inter-ior world of Untouchables have been explored by a profusion of writers, some of them highly talented. It is tempting, and indeed legitimate, to see this new literature as heir to the great tradition of bhakti, though many of its exponents reject this tradition, Chokha Mela in particular, for its acceptance of inequality in the expectation of a better world in the life-to-come. The resort to literary means of communicating Dalit anger has been consciously adopted in disgust at what is perceived to be the failure of orthodox politics to transform the lives of the Dalits. Clearly the Dalit literature is an intensely political body of writing, some of it infused more with passion than with concern for literary effect. But the best Dalit writers are widely recognised as having created a literature of genuine merit.
Nor is this Dalit literature confined to Maharashtra. There is now a vigorous assembly of Dalit writers in Karnataka too. The immediate origins of this movement can be located in a speech delivered in 1974 by a Minister in the Congress Government of Karnataka. Basavalingappa, an Untouchable, was moved to describe the literature of Kannada, the lan-guage of the region, as little more than boosa or cattle fodder. He had in mind this literature's lack of attention to the lives of ordinary people, among them the Untouchables (still usually called Adi-Karnataka). It was as if Basavalingappa had put a torch to a pile of tinder, so great was the explosion of both acclamation and repudiation. To the orthodox cus-todians of Kannada literature the Untouchable Minister had defamed their cultural heritage in the service of a mindless radicalism. But to an astonishingly large number of actual or aspiring Dalit writers, Basavalingappa had opened the door to a palace of opportunity to express their rejection of their own place in Karnataka society . A conference of Dalit writers was held in 1974, and some hundreds are said to have attended (Indudan Honnapur interview: in January 1988). In subsequent years this Dalit literary movement has moved in a number of directions. For example, one group of young Dalits has established a popular weekly magazine, Sugathi, which combines the transmission of popular culture (film features and so on) with political and social comment on Dalit affairs. Its readership is mostly drawn from Adi-Karnatakas themselves, and in 1988 circulation was some 65,000 copies.
The literary movement preceded any narrow political expression of Dalit radicalism in Karnataka, and subsequent institutional forms have not followed the pattern of Maharashtra. Without the direct legacy of Ambedkar, the Karnataka Dalits have not sought to establish a Dalit political party. Rather, the Dalit Sangharsh Samiti has been set up as something of an umbrella organisation for the various Dalit groups within the State. Dalit activities have been directed to educating the conscious-ness of Adi-Karnataka adults and children, and staging agitations and demonstrations on matters of particular concern. A special focus has been on Harijan atrocities. Within particular industries - the nationalised banks, for example - there are organisations of Dalit workers. Many of the Dalit activists have embraced Buddhism and are engaged in increasing their knowledge of the literature of this religion and proselytising among the unconverted. But while the Karnataka movement has derived its inspiration from Ambedkar and from the Maharashtra movement in general, there is also a concern to avoid what is seen to be the Maharashtra defect of being too inward-looking and exclusive. Some of these activists have gone so far as to reject reservation of jobs and parliamentary seats as a trap which cuts them off from other progressive elements and also fails to do anything for the larger Dalit community. And there is special scorn for the occupants of reserved seats in legislatures. While there have been no intense ideological splits in Karnataka, there is evidence of the same tensions that have so destructively affected the Ambedkarite movement in Maharashtra. The recurrent choice for radical Untouchables everywhere is between cultivating a separate Untouchable identity or constructing alliances with all oppressed people who are prepared to listen.
Even more than in Maharashtra, the Dalit movement of Karnataka has been an urban phenomenon. The Untouchable castes of village Karnataka have not been drawn into a movement whose main preoccupa-tions have been literary, cultural and religious. During a visit to his ances-tral village, one of our Dalit guides - a leader among Dalit bank employees and a Buddhist - spoke scornfully of the backwardness of the Adi-Karnataka there. They lacked ambition and remained locked into a world of drudgery, alcohol and attachment to what he called ~some non-veg god'. To this man there was no point in trying to rouse the conscious-ness of his caste fellows and relatives in the village. His time was better spent working with young men studying in schools and colleges in the towns, and in staging demonstrations that would catch the eye of the media.
The lack of mobilisation of village Untouchables in Karnataka and even Maharashtra serves to point up the distinctiveness of the rural revolt in Bihar. In so far as there has been an ideological guide to the activity in Bihar, it has been a derivative of revolutionary Marxism. This should not lead us to conclude that Marxism is the appropriate ideology for the Dalits of Karnataka and Maharashtra, or that Ambedkarite principles are inherently incapable of attracting widespread support in rural India. As we shall see, Kanshi Ram has skilfully used the figure of Ambedkar to build a following among rural as well as urban Chamars in Uttar Pradesh. But it is notable that the Bihar mobilisation has proceeded primarily on demonstrations on matters of particular concern. A special focus has been on Harijan atrocities. Within particular industries - the nationalised banks, for example - there are organisations of Dalit workers. Many of the Dalit activists have embraced Buddhism and are engaged in increasing their knowledge of the literature of this religion and proselytising among the unconverted. But while the Karnataka movement has derived its inspiration from Ambedkar and from the Maharashtra movement in general, there is also a concern to avoid what is seen to be the Maharashtra defect of being too inward-looking and exclusive. Some of these activists have gone so far as to reject reservation of jobs and parliamentary seats as a trap which cuts them off from other progressive ele-ments and also fails to do anything for the larger Dalit community. And there is special scorn for the occupants of reserved seats in legislatures. While there have been no intense ideological splits in Karnataka, there is evidence of the same tensions that have so destructively affected the Ambedkarite movement in Maharashtra. The recurrent choice for radical Untouchables everywhere is between cultivating a separate Untouchable identity or constructing alliances with all oppressed people who are pre-pared to listen.
Even more than in Maharashtra, the Dalit movement of Karnataka has been an urban phenomenon. The Untouchable castes of village Karnataka have not been drawn into a movement whose main preoccupa-tions have been literary, cultural and religious. During a visit to his ances-tral village, one of our Dalit guides - a leader among Dalit bank employees and a Buddhist - spoke scornfully of the backwardness of the Adi-Karnataka there. They lacked ambition and remained locked into a world of drudgery, alcohol and attachment to what he called 'some non-veg god'. To this man there was no point in trying to rouse the conscious-ness of his caste fellows and relatives in the village. His time was better spent working with young men studying in schools and colleges in the towns, and in staging demonstrations that would catch the eye of the media.
The lack of mobilisation of village Untouchables in Karnataka and even Maharashtra serves to point up the distinctiveness of the rural revolt in Bihar. In so far as there has been an ideological guide to the activity in Bihar, it has been a derivative of revolutionary Marxism. This should not lead us to conclude that Marxism is the appropriate ideology for the Dalits of Karnataka and Maharashtra, or that Ambedkarite principles are inherently incapable of attracting widespread support in rural India. As we shall see, Kanshi Ram has skilfully used the figure of Ambedkar to build a following among rural as well as urban Chamars in Uttar Pradesh. But it is notable that the Bihar mobilisation has proceeded primarily on the basis of several pragmatic issues - social respect, higher wages and access to land - that have had an immediate and powerful resonance with the Untouchable population. These are the same broad issues that were the core of the program of Ambedkar's Independent Labour Party from 1937 t0 1942, and in somewhat variant form they were also the foundation of the later Republican Party and Dalit Panthers. But none of these bodies actually pursued their program with any determination, and the post-Independence organisations fell seriously out of step with village Mahars at the same time as they became further isolated from communi-ties other than the Mahars. Part of the problem has been Buddhism: despite its merits as a wellspring of personal empowerment, Buddhism scarcely speaks to the issues that are of immediate concern to poor villag-ers of Mahar or any other Untouchable caste. In so far as the Dalit leader-ship of Maharashtra has concentrated on the project of Buddhism, they have tended to abdicate from a position where mobilisation of village and less educated Untouchables is a possibility. Even worse, preoccupation with another religious system has driven a positive wedge between the Mahar Buddhists and Hindus from other poor and subordinated com-munities.
But despite the limitations of the Ambedkarite movement as an electoral and mobilising force in western India, the thought and life of Babasaheb Ambedkar enjoy a tremendous and indeed fast-growing potency across large parts of India. Within Maharashtra itself one of the recent expressions of this was the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations surrounding the publication of Ambedkar's work Riddles in Hinduism. This work is part of a multi-volume set of Ambedkar's writ-ings being published, or usually republished, by the Government of Maharashtra under the direction of Dalit scholars. That the project has gone forward at all is testimony to the weight of Ambedkar's writing and the political passion of his followers. Riddles in Hinduism had been consid-ered too inflammatory a work to be published during Ambedkar's life-time, and tens of years after it was written the work had scarcely become less controversial.
While Maharashtra and neighbouring Karnataka remain the centres where Ambedkar's legacy is taken most seriously, the physical image of the historical figure is now to be found on posters and in the form of statues in countless locations throughout India. The propagation of Babasaheb's image has become both a sacred duty to his followers and also an easily available means for politicians and political hopefuls to posi-tion themselves as radical champions of their own communities. Juxtaposition of one's own image beside that of Ambedkar can now be an alternative to statement of a clear political position. But more positively, through the politics of iconography Dalits have been busy reclaiming their own twentieth-century history. The great loser in this struggle of images is Gandhi. Whereas once Gandhi could be portrayed as the great champion of the 'Harijan', now Dalits themselves prefer to ignore or even castigate him for condescension and adherence to subordinating orthdoxy. Now it is Ambedkar who shows the way in thousands of out-of-the-way locations to which his writ did not run during his own lifetime.

Untouchable politics during the era of Congress dominance

2008-05-26T00:51:00.000-07:00

The attachment of Untouchables to Congress during the 1930S and 40S was far less than is sometimes assumed. In the years after Independence Untouchable support for Congress clearly strengthened. From 1952 until 1989, with the exception of the post-Emergency election of 1977, Untouchables tended to function in both national and State elections as a 'vote bank' for Congress. Their vote for Congress was a vote for the party of government, a party that had committed itself to a program of action on Untouchability and poverty. In rational terms and here their situation was similar to that of the Muslims there was little electoral choice open to Untouchables in most parts of the country.
If the Left had developed more strength outside what became its strongholds in West Bengal and Kerala, the Untouchable attachment to Congress might have been less. Thus in the very first post-Independence election of 1952 the Socialists won a good part of the Scheduled Caste vote. But this was the highpoint of their electoral experience in that State. It is only in the nineties that the logic of class (albeit often dressed in the garb of caste) is again being asserted across large parts of India, particularly the north.
While the Untouchables were a crucial Congress vote bank in India as a whole and in a majority of individual States, even before the recent flux they did not cling to Congress in regions where another party or move-ment rose to dominance. The major examples of long-term non-Congress dominance are West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Untouchables in the former two States have for a number of years had a strong identification with the Communist Party in its several divisions - in recent years predominantly with the dominant Communist Party of India (Marxist) . A number of Ezhavas associated themselves with the fledgling Communist Party from the early 1940S, but with increasing prosperity the caste vote has been split along class lines between the Communists and Congress .
As to the other and poorer Untouchable castes of Kerala, these have been far less influen-tial in the councils of the Communist movement. But in conformity with the class divisions of Kerala politics, the Scheduled Castes have tended to gravitate towards the parties of the Left. In West Bengal, the Communist movement was slower to gain control of the State: the first United Front Government came to power in 1967, a decade after the first such govern-ment in Kerala. Support for the CPI(M) in West Bengal has been broadly based and not confined to particular castes, but again the party has done particularly well among poorer voters and therefore among the Scheduled Castes.
In short, the Untouchables of Kerala and West Bengal have behaved according to the logic of their class position within a polit-ical culture more directed to considerations of class than anywhere else in India. But from another perspective the Untouchables of these two States have been doing little different from their counterparts elsewhere in India. They have simply aligned themselves with the majority party - it is doubtful that most of these Untouchables have been affected with any special passion for Marxism.
In Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh regional parties have come to dominate State politics. The non-Brahmin movement of Tamil Nadu spawned a succession of parties - first the Justice Party and after Independence the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and Anna DMK. Anti-Brahminism has been joined with Dravidian nationalism to produce a highly distinctive political and popular culture. For decades State elections have largely been fought out between the DMK and Anna DMK, each of which lays claim to the common culture. The Untouchables were relatively slow to embrace the culture, given their break with the non-Brahmin movement in the early 1920S and their subsequent attraction to Congress. But with the dominance asserted by the DMK and then the Anna DMK from the late 196os, the Untouchables have been rolled up into the prevailing politics of the State. But since Congress has often been able to engineer electoral accommodations with one or other of the three dominant leaders over the last three decades -Karunanidhi and the film star politicians M. Ramachandran (MGR) and Jayalalitha - many Tamil Untouchables have voted for the DMK or Anna DMK at State elections and for Congress in national elections.
If we turn to Andhra, the emergence of a dominant regional party is more recent. The Telegu Desam party of Andhra has been built around N. I Rama Rao, the charismatic Telegu movie star. NTR's style, like that of the Tamil leaders, was best described as populist, and his party attracted Untouch-able voters as it moved into a position of dominance. But Telegu Desam has not been so dominant even in State elections as have successive regional parties in Tamil Nadu. In short, and unlike the position in the Communist States, in both Tamil Nadu and Andhra the Untouchables have not been wholly lost to Congress.
Within Congress the importance of the Untouchable vote did not translate itself into great influence for individual Untouchables in either the organisation or the ministry. In particular, the building of the com-pensatory discrimination system arose more from the arithmetic of elec-tions and the goodwill of sections of the elite than from the efforts of Dalit parliamentarians. Jagjivan Ram was alone as a Scheduled Caste politician in becoming a genuinely national figure through Congress. There have been a couple of Chief Ministers - one of them was Bhole Paswan Shastri, who three times held this position in Bihar for very brief periods in the 1950s. Bhole Paswan was respected for his modesty, dignity and probity, but he made no deep mark on even State politics: his life and career are discussed in the next chapter. A small number of other State and national politicians have gained a measure of ministerial seniority, but none has had either a long period at the apex of ministerial service or any sub-stantial political base. Just why this is the case may require an answer at several levels.
Perhaps it is to be expected that a collection of castes dis-tinguished by their overall subordination would not produce the highest crop of educated, experienced and generally talented politicians. Over time the gap in education and sophistication between Untouchables and, say, Brahmins has diminished, and the depth of talent among Untouchable aspirants for high office is no doubt growing. But it will not help the Untouchable cause to deny that there has been a gap at all. On the other hand, issues of talent and preparation for public office can scarcely constitute the primary explanation for the low representation of Untouchables at the highest political levels.
There are persistent suggestions that Dalit politicians have not thrived within Congress if they have too strenuously promoted the cause of their own people. This is an explanation sometimes offered in relation to Yogendra Makwana, a talented and energetic Minister of the early 19805 whose career did not prosper under either Indira or Rajiv Gandhi. Makwana can be contrasted with Buta Singh, a Mazhabi Sikh (converted from a Sweeper caste) who rose to the position of Home Minister under the same Prime Ministers. Buta Singh (later relegated to a junior portfo-lio under Narasimha Rao) was known for his political savoir-faire and his loyalty to the Nehru family, rather than for any particular zeal for the problems of the Scheduled Castes. Of course, as a category Prime Ministers tend to distrust colleagues of whatever community if they have a political base or agenda independent of their own.
Yet it remains an important truth that the ideological and social makeup of Congress has made it less than welcoming to highly assertive advocates of the Untouchable cause. Low social standing has also made individual Untouchable spokesmen relatively easy targets for political demolition. Untouchables have therefore tended to construct their political careers as dependants within factions led by high-caste politicians. It is impossible to think of a single example of a substantial multi-caste faction leader who is/was himself a Dalit.
Something more needs to be said here about the career of Jagjivan Ram. Under the patronage of the Nehrus Jagjivan Ram rose to the posi-tion of Defence Minister. He climbed a rung higher to the post of Deputy Prime Minister under Charan Singh in 1979, a position that rewarded him for ostensibly having delivered the Untouchable vote to the Janata coalition in the extraordinary election of 1977. Jagjivan Ram's career is notable for its extraordinary longevity, a consequence of both his compe-tence and also his carefulness not to engage in dissent and controversy. On both counts he was the ideal Untouchable for Congress to promote through its ranks.
Jagjivan Ram was the only significant Untouchable to have played a strong part in Gandhi's Harijan movement of the 1930s. He became President of the All-India Depressed Classes League formed in 1935, and was elected to the Bihar Assembly for Congress in the election of 1937. In 1946 he was appointed Labour Minister in the Viceroy's Executive Council, and from then (with a short interregnum during the Kamaraj Plan) he held Cabinet positions in successive Congress Governments and later the Janata Government until its electoral defeat in 1980. Once he became a Minister he seems not to have made Untouchability a central preoccupation in either speech or action. His most extensive public comment is to be found in a small book published in 1980, Caste Challenge in India.
This book is neither novel in its analysis nor specially hard-hitting, though clearly its author believed that he could be more expansive now that his career had come to an end. Thus despite the book's mild tone, the preface contains the propitiatory remark that his views are offered 'not to hurt any class or caste but to provide a brief historical account of the Hindu social system... and the miserable condition of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
It is difficult to estimate the power that Jagjivan Ram wielded within Congress. He played an important role at several critical moments in the post-Nehru era: he supported Indira Gandhi's candidacy for Prime Minister in 1966, stayed with her when Congress split in 1969, and quit the party in 1977. Paul Brass observes that he was 'always thought to be able to control 40 to 6o votes in Parliament and was deferred to in the Congress for that reason' . But the quality of this 'control' is not self-evident. It seems likely that he had more power than anyone else in selecting Scheduled Caste candidates for Congress from the reserved seats in Bihar, and he may have exercised some power in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh and perhaps other States too; his qualifica-tion was not only his long career but also the fact that his own Chamar caste was by far the largest Scheduled Caste of north India.
Presumably Ram's role in the selection of candidates invested him with some influ-ence in relation to the MPs who depended upon his continued support. Thus it is possible that he was able to deliver votes to Indira Gandhi in the succession contest after the death of Prime Minister Shastri and in the Congress split of 1969. But when he left Congress in 1977 he failed to persuade any of the Party's other Scheduled Caste MPs to accompany him. And more importantly, there is no evidence that he either sought or was able to mobilise a bloc of MPs in order to make policy gains for the Scheduled Castes within Cabinet. Any part he may have played in either the development or maintenance of programs and policies favourable to Untouchables was for the most part hidden. It is suggested that when he was Minister for Railways he was successful in rapidly building up the Scheduled Caste (allegedly mainly Chamar) component of the railways workforce. And in his other portfolios too he may have exerted pressure for the legal quotas to be filled. But by far his most potent moment came when he left Congress on the eve of the post-Emergency election in 1977, since his departure seemed to crystallise the first large anti-Congress vote among north Indian Untouchables. This vote was of major signifi-cance to the outcome of the election. But the limits of Jagjivan Ram's electoral appeal and the special nature of the 1977 election were revealed when he failed to prevent the return of these same voters to Congress in 1980.
There is no single set of characteristics common to the leadership of Congress over the last half century, but a glance at the background of those at the very apex of Indian politics is instructive. All five Congress Prime Ministers have been Brahmins, including three from the Nehru family. In the non-Congress Governments of 1977-9 and 1989-91 two of the Prime Ministers were Rajputs, one was a Brahmin and the third was Charan Singh, a Jat, and till then the only Prime Minister from a background other than that of a twice-born (upper) caste. Now Deve Gowda, short-lived Prime Minister after the 1996 election, shares that status with Charan Singh. While it is not possible to extrapolate from the caste background of Prime Ministers to the background of Congress leaders in general, high-caste and particularly Brahmin domination of the most senior positions has been characteristic of Congress throughout its long history. Nor is this phenomenon confined to Congress. Atul Kohli has produced figures to show that both Congress and Communist Party dominated Governments in West Bengal have had a strikingly skewed caste composition.
The caste of Ministers in Congress Governments in West Bengal between 1952 and 1962 was 23 per cent Brahmin, 31 per cent Kayastha, 24 per cent Vaishya, and only 2 per cent Scheduled Caste. In the case of Governments led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) between 1977 and 1982 there were even more Brahmins than in the Congress Governments, over 35 per cent; the number of Kayasthas (:3' per cent) and Vaishyas (23 per cent) was almost the same as in Congress Governments, while Scheduled Caste representation was marginally lower at 1.5 per cent (Kohli 1990: 374). These figures must be read in the context of a State which has the highest concentration of Scheduled Caste people in the country - now almost 24 per cent (Census 1991). Demonstrably, the many Scheduled Caste members of the West Bengal Assembly have almost no chance of rising to the position of Minister. Their representation is even lower if inferior Ministers - Ministers of State and Deputy Ministers - are left out. In the Governments formed after the elections of 1952, 1957, 1962, 1977 and 1982 there was not a single Scheduled Caste member of the Council of Ministers, Of course, it is not merely the Scheduled Castes that have been grossly underrepresented in West Bengali Cabinets - the same is true for Scheduled Tribes, Muslims and lower-caste Hindus.
A similar, if less pronounced, pattern is true of the organisational wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and given the ideological orientation of the party it is worth attending to this phenomenon more closely.4 In both Kerala and West Bengal Untouchables are scarcely represented at the highest levels of the Party. In Kerala, those who have risen to leading Party positions from poor backgrounds have almost always come from 'proletarian' unions of the towns. The Ezhava domi-nated bidi workers union is one such example. Scheduled Caste workers in Kerala still tend to be agricultural labourers, and they have found it impossible to rise to the top of the Party hierarchy. In West Bengal, until the late sixties the Party was essentially an urban and high-caste organisa-tion. With the later focus on agrarian problems there has been a growing membership drawn from the villages. Scheduled Caste membership is now in double figures, most of it rural in origin (though not usually drawn from the ranks of agricultural labourers, the lowest agrarian category). But even if such people are as likely as anyone else to rise to the top of the Party - a questionable assumption - it would take considerable time before their presence might be felt.
It is not open to infer the whole character of a government or a political party from the caste composition of its senior members. The Communist governments of West Bengal and Kerala have been among the best State governments in India in terms of both probity and service to their poorer citizens. But even these governments are vulnerable to criticism for their insufficient attention to those at the very bottom of the social hierarchy. For example, both governments have frequently been attacked for their failure to meet job reservation quotas. Presumably this failure can be said to arise from an ideological antipathy to programs constructed on the basis of social primordialism (caste). But it can also scarcely be irrelevant that reservation is adverse to the interests of large proportions of the castes that predominate within the government.5 Even in less intensely caste conscious West Bengal it cannot be assumed that Communist Ministers are effectively without caste (or class). This is not to propose the existence of a caste conspiracy or even a lack of goodwill towards the underprivileged. It is merely to recognise that it is difficult to induce and sustain a sense of urgency about the claims of out-groups in the absence of their own advocates.
A deeper criticism of the Communist governments can be levelled at their agrarian programs. Thus Kerala has one of the poorer records of land reform among the various States. There has been only a slight amount of redistribution of agricultural land, and agricultural labourers (many of them Untouchables) have had to be content with gaining own-ership of the land on which their 'hutment' is built within the village. Kerala has done far better in the matter of fixing minimum wages for its agricultural labourers, though here there have been some unfortunate consequences. Partly because of the resulting high cost of labour there has been a radical reduction in the amount of work available to Kerala labourers: mechanisation, leaving land fallow, and employment of out-of-State workers have been options preferred by many employers. The West Bengal experience on the same two issues has been the reverse of that of Kerala. West Bengal has done much better in the area of land redistribu-tion, and it has also accomplished significant reforms for sharecroppers. But the CPI(M) Government has paid little attention to the interests of the army of agricultural labourers in the State. A large proportion of these labourers are, of course, from the Scheduled Castes, and their rates of pay and general living conditions are at the poorer end of the national scale. Nor is Operation Barga (see above, p. 155) beyond criticism. These reforms were abandoned at the highly incomplete point when further action would have directly injured the interests of small, usually absentee, landlords. Many of these mainly high-caste people have been supporters of the CPI(M) regime, and the decision can therefore be painted in tones of political pragmatism. Moreover, in an 'encircled' polity such as West Bengal there are undoubtedly limits to just how much redistribution is a possibility. Clearly we must be careful not to repackage the whole huge problem of Indian poverty and inequality into the receptacle of caste -this will make no analytical sense, nor indicate a way out of the practical condition. Nonetheless, we doubt it can be said that ties of caste and com-munity, wrapped up in positions of class, are of no relevance to the policy and performance of the Government of West Bengal.
The above question can be crystallised by reference to Ambedkar's description of Indian Communists as 'a bunch of Brahman boys' (Harrison 1960: 191). He was referring not only to the number of Brahmins within the Party, but also to discriminatory attitudes and blind-ness to the problems of the Untouchables. If we discount the hyperbole, the observation contains a (slippery) grain of truth. On the one hand we should not subscribe to the false proposition that only the representatives of a particular community are capable of working for the good of that community. But we must also recognise that a community or a people needs to speak for itself if its interests and potential are to be realised to any great degree. This is the dialectic embedded in the issue of Untouchable representation in contemporary politics. Thus it is reason-able to assume that greater Untouchable representation at the highest levels would produce outcomes more favourable to their own people than occurs through government dominated by the high castes. The benefits would no doubt range from individual allocations (such as jobs, licences, contracts) to broader policy. To give one small but important example of possible policy, greater Untouchable presence in government could conceivably lead to the application of more pressure towards the exten-sion of affirmative action into private- and not merely public-sector enter-prises. This is exactly the sort of non-revolutionary but quite far-reaching change that is potentially within the realm of government action in India

The surprising durability of the Bahujana Samaj Party

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The last several years have been an exhilarating roller coaster ride for Kanshi Ram, replete with towering peaks and deep troughs. His ambition has been to become the kind of national leader the Dalits have never had. In 1994 he made his most concerted bid to build a national movement by conducting rallies and meetings in Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. The Bahujana Samaj had contested seats in a number of these States as early as 1989, but Kanshi Ram was now more serious about taking his message throughout the country. But these efforts came to little, particularly in the strong Communist States of Kerala and West Bengal. There, his caste-based analysis failed to cut into the prevailing ideology constructed out of the language of class. Kanshi Ram developed a considerable following in Andhra, where he staged a number of impressive rallies. It seemed for a time that he could have entered into a governing alliance with NTR's Telegu Desam Party, but negotiations broke down and the Bahujana Samaj was soon a spent force in Andhra. After the fall of Mayawati's Government in Lucknow it became clear that the national and provincial elections of 1996 would be crucial to the very survival of the party.
Although candidates were to be put up in a number of States, Uttar Pradesh was by far the most important arena. Given the close competi-tion between the three leading political forces - Congress, the BJP and the 'Third Front' of leftist and regional parties - Kanshi Ram hoped to be in a position to dictate outcomes at both State and national levels. But the whole history of his party suggested that there could be little electoral success without an alliance with another major force. The logical partner was the Janata Dal, but Kanshi Ram declared himself against any new alliance that included Mulayam . This stand appeared tantamount to political suicide. It was clear that Kanshi Ram's movement could not easily survive a poor result in Uttar Pradesh in 1996. Unlike the figure of Ram Vilas Paswan, Kanshi Ram had set his sights on great and rapid victories. His age and ill health seem to have intensified the sense of urgency that had succeeded the patience of his earlier years in politics.
Considering its lack of strategic alliances, the Bahujana Samaj Party did surprisingly well in the Lok Sabha election of 1996. It won a total of eleven seats, six of them in Uttar Pradesh, three in Punjab and two in Madhya Pradesh. (In the previous Parliament its only UP seat was the one occupied by Kanshi Ram himself.) It was clear that Mayawati had become something of a cult figure in Uttar Pradesh. And in order to com-pensate for its lack of partners the party had energetically sought to woo communities other than its own vote bank of Chamars. The still leader-less Muslims were a particular target, and about one-quarter of the party's tickets in Uttar Pradesh had been conceded to Muslims (The Pioneer: i8 September 1996). There were also a number of Backward Caste candidates.
In the subsequent UP Assembly election in 1996 Kanshi Ram and Mayawati reverted to the approach of constructing a strategic alliance. This time their ally was Congress. Amazingly, given its glorious past, Congress was relegated to the position ofjunior partner, and it was agreed that the combination's candidate for Chief Minister would be Mayawati. Kanshi Ram was reported to have asked Congress to field 100 Brahmins in the 125 seats allotted to it, so as to wean the upper castes from the BJP and attract them back to Congress . Again Kanshi Ram was playing the caste game with ruthless application. His own list of candidates was carefully mixed according to the appropriate communitarian formula: of his sixty-seven successful candidates, nine are upper caste representatives, twelve are Muslims, twenty-six from the Backward Castes and twenty Dalits .
The overall result of the 1996 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election was strikingly similar to the previous Assembly election: the BJP won 174 seats in the Assembly of 425 seats; Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi Party won 110 seats; and the Bahujana Samaj (67) and Congress (33) jointly won ioo. Again there was a stalemate. For a time it appeared that Mulayam Singh, now installed as Defence Minister in New Delhi, would be forced by his coalition partners at the centre to back a Bahujana Samaj-Congress Government in Uttar Pradesh. This plan ultimately col-lapsed under the weight of multiple rivalries and suspicions. President's rule from the centre persisted until finally a Bahujana Samaj-BJP coali-tion Government took office in Lucknow in March 1997. This time the agreement was that Mayawati would serve as Chief Minister for six months and then give way to Kalyan Singh from the BJP for the same period. Again Kanshi Ram and Mayawati could argue that it did not matter which of the 'Manuwadi' parties they made an alliance with Congress or the BJP. Their task was simply to get into government and remake the system from the inside. And second time around their abrasiveness has been even greater. During the drawn-out struggle to form a Government Mayawati was so fearful of her Assemblymen defect-ing to other parties that she locked them up in the Party headquarters in Lucknow for a period of weeks. They were not allowed out of the build-ing, not even for Diwali, and visitors could see them for no more than fifteen minutes at a time . During this same period Kanshi Ram's always strained relations with the 'Manuwadi' media deteriorated to the point that he ordered an attack on a group of journalists outside his official residence in New Delhi. He personally assaulted one of the journalists, and criminal charges are pending.
It is far too early to make a mature assessment of the Kanshi Ram- Mayawati phenomenon. Early on it might have been thought that the two leaders had achieved little more than the transfer of Congress Chamars to their own party in the context of the overall collapse of Congress in the north. It is certainly true that their only stable 'vote bank' is the Chamars, and no doubt a principal reason for the Chamars' support is their understanding that this is 'their' party. The Chamars have also responded favourably to Kanshi Ram and Mayawati's arrogant disdain for orthodoxy and their denunciation of the large and petty oppressions that still characterise the lives of many Chamars. This com-munity is now richer, better educated and bolder than when it gave its support to Jagjivan Ram. But Kanshi Ram and more recently Mayawati have also worked hard to dispel the notion that their party represents only the Dalits, let alone simply the Chamars. They have had consider-able success in attracting other groups, including Muslims, to their cause, despite their willingness to cultivate relations with the anti-Muslim BJP. To what extent their approach is more than opportunistic exploitation of the multiple divisions of contemporary Uttar Pradesh society remains a question. Perhaps this question will partly be answered by the impact Mayawati can make on the apparatus of government in Uttar Pradesh, such that a culture of governance less hostile to those at the bottom of the social hierarchy begins to emerge. Undoubtedly Kanshi Ram and Mayawati have their faults, but they do represent a more aggressive attack on the order of social orthodoxy than has previ-ously been seen from participants in the mainstream of Indian electoral politics. Kanshi Ram has shown that a person of Dalit origins can lead a party that wins seats at the ballot box and is not afraid to form a Government that puts the interests of the most subordinated Indians at its very centre. Throughout India it will now be more difficult to ignore the interests of Dalits.

Kanshi Ram: from BAMCEF to the Bahujana Samaj Party

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Kanshi Ram was born in 1934 as a Raedasi Sikh, a community of Punjabi Chamars converted to Sikhism. The family had 4 or 5 acres of land, some of it inherited and the rest acquired through government allocation after Independence), a small landed background is characteristic of many Scheduled Caste legislators but remains a comparative rarity for Dalits in general. Kanshi Ram's father was himself 'slightly' literate, and he managed to educate all his four daughters and three sons. Kanshi Ram, the eldest, is the only graduate. He was given a reserved position in the Survey of India after completing his BSc degree, and in 1958 he transferred to the Department of Defence Production as a scientific assistant in a munitions factory in Poona. Kanshi Ram had encountered no Untouchability as a child, and overt discrimination was not a phenomenon within the educated circles of his adult life. But his outlook underwent a sudden change in 1965 when he became caught up in a struggle initiated by other Scheduled Caste employees to prevent the abolition of a holiday commemorating Dr Anibedkar's birthday.
During this conflict Kanshi Ram encountered a depth of high-caste prejudice and hostility towards Dalits that was a revelation to him. His almost instant radicalisation was completed soon after by a reading of Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste: he read the book three times in one night, going entirely without sleep.
Kanshi Ram's introduction to the political ideas of Ambedkar - he has never been attracted to Buddhism - was through his Mahar Buddhist colleague and friend at the munitions factory, D. K. Khaparde. Together the two of them began formulating ideas for an organisation to be built by educated employees from the Scheduled and Backward castes. Such an organisation would work against harassment and oppression by high-caste officers, and also enable the often inward-looking occupants of reserved postions to give something back to their own communities. So Kanshi Ram and Khaparde began to contact likely recruits in Poona. At about this time Kanshi Ram abandoned any thought of marriage, largely because it did not fit into a life he now wanted to dedicate to public con-cerns. He had also quite lost interest in his career, though he continued in the job until about 1971. He finally left after a severe conflict over the non-appointment of an apparently qualified Scheduled Caste young woman. During this conflict he had gone so far as to strike a senior official, and he did not even bother attending most of the ensuing disciplinary pro-ceedings. He had already made up his mind to become a full-time activist, and the movement was by then strong enough to meet his modest needs.
In 1971 Kanshi Ram and his colleagues established the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and Minorities Employees Welfare Association, which was duly registered under the Poona Charity Commissioner. Their primary object was: To subject our problems to close scrutiny and find out quick and equitable solu-tions to the problems of injustice and harassment of our employees in general and the educated employees in particular.
Despite the Association's inclusive reach, its aggressively Ambedkarite stance ensured that most of its members were Mahar Buddhists. Within a year of its establishment there were more than one thousand members and it was able to open an office in Poona: many of the members were from the Defence and Post and Telegraph Departments, and their first annual conference was addressed by the then Defence Minister, Jagjivan Ram. Kanshi Ram's next organisational step was to create the basis of a national association of Scheduled Caste government servants. As early as 1973 he and his colleagues established the All India Backward and Minority Employees Federation (BAMCEF), and a functioning office was established in Delhi in 1976. BAMCEF was relaunched with greater fanfare on 6 December 1978, the anniversary of Ambedkar's death, with claims of two thousand delegates joining a procession to the Boat Club Lawns in New Delhi . Although the stated objects of the new organisation were essentially the same as those of the earlier body, the rhetoric had grown bolder. It was not merely the oppressors who came in the line of fire, but also many of the reserved office holders too:
As all the avenues of advance are closed to them in the field of agriculture, trade, commerce and industry almost all the educated persons from these oppressed communities are trapped in Govt. services. About 2 million educated oppressed Indians have already joined various types of sobs during the last 26 years. Civil Service Conduct rules put some restrictions on them. But their inherent timidity, cowardice, selfishness and lack of desire for Social Service to their own creed have made them exceptionally useless to the general mass of the oppressed Indians.The only ray of hope is that almost everywhere in the country there are some edu-cated employees who feel deeply agitated about the miserable existence of their brethren.

By the mid-1970S Kanshi Ram had established a broad if not dense network of contacts throughout Maharashtra and adjacent regions. During his frequent train trips from Poona to Delhi, he adopted the habit of getting down at major stations along the way - Nagpur, Jabalpur and Bhopal, among others - to contact likely sympathisers and to try to recruit them to the organisation . Once he had moved to Delhi he pushed into Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, as well as further into Madhya Pradesh. Parallel to his work among edu-cated employees Kanshi Ram was also contacting a wider audience with simple presentations of Ambedkar's teachings. Thus in 1980 he put together a roadshow called 'Ambedkar Mela on Wheels'. This was an oral and pictorial account of Ambedkar's life and views, together with con-temporary material on oppression, atrocities and poverty. Between April and June 1980 the show was carted to thirty-four destinations in nine
States of the north. Jang Bahadur Patel, a Kurmi (Backward Caste) and President of the Uttar Pradesh Branch of the Bahujana Samaj Party until late 1995, recalls meeting Kanshi Ram for the first time when he brought his roadshow to Lucknow (Interview: 25 November 1995). Kanshi Ram talked persuasively about how Ambedkar had struggled for all the down-trodden classes, and how the Scheduled Castes, Tribes and also the Backwards and Minorities were all victims of Brahminism. Because of their weight of numbers, these people had the potential to convert them-selves from 'beggars to rulers'. It was all a matter of organisation. Patel immediately joined BAMCEF, though he was in a distinct minority as a non-Untouchable: Untouchables constituted about 90 per cent of the membership, with the other io per cent being split between tribals and Backward Caste people.
BAMCEF's motto, 'Educate, Organise and Agitate', was adopted from Ambedkar, and its activities were formally divided into a number of welfare and proselytising objects. But increasingly Kanshi Ram's agita-tional activities were leading him into politics. By the late 70S he was no longer content with being the leader of reserved office holders, a class for whom he had less than complete respect. Kanshi Ram's first attempt to create a radical political vehicle capable of mobilising the larger body of Dalits was the Dalit SoshitSamaj Sangharsh Samiti (DS4) formed in 1981. This was conceived as a political organisation parallel to BAMCEF: it shared the same President in Kanshi Ram, the same office, and many of the same members. DS4 was a quasi- rather than fully fledged political party, partly because government servants were forbidden to take part in electoral politics. But DS4 made little concrete progress, and late in 1984 Kanshi Ram took the plunge and formed the Bahujana Samaj Party (a variant on the name of Phule's nineteenth-century organisation). Inevitably, this caused major strains in BAMCEF ranks. Their agitational activities had placed many of his colleagues from the Poona and early Delhi periods in a delicate position as government servants and, in any case, the political loyalty of many of them was to the several strands of the Republican Party. There were also strains arising from Kanshi Ram's will to total domination of all three organisations. And the need for money was rising with the push into politics: one of the Maharashtra workers recalls delivering Kanshi Ram a purse of forty thousand rupees collected from Maharashtra in 1984. These several strains grew more severe over the next two years, and early in 1986 a major split took place. Kanshi Ram announced at that time that he was no longer willing to work for any organisation other than the Bahujana Samaj Party. His transition from social worker to politician was complete.
Kanshi Ram is more an organiser and political strategist than an innov-ative thinker or charismatic public speaker. While his Ambedkarite ideol-ogy has remained constant and lacking in any innovation, there has been a progressive sharpening of his rhetoric. The early issues of BAMCEF's monthly magazine, The Oppressed Indian, were full of his didactic exposi-tions of Ambedkar's views on Indian society. These have now given way to simpler formulations, repeated in numerous newspaper accounts and both public and private speech. The central proposition is that Indian society is characterised by the self-interested rule of io per cent over the other 90 per cent (the bahujan samaj or common people). Although the ruling io per cent is composed of several castes, they derive their legiti-macy and ruling ideology from Brahminism. All the institutions of society reflect this ruling ideology and distortion, including the press. These institutions can therefore be termed Manuwadi (after the great Brahmin-inspired text) or Brahminwadi. In the marketplace of elections, such simplicity has been further reduced to crudeness and epithet. A slogan coined after the formation of DS4 was, 'Brahmin, Bania, Thakur Chor, Baki Sab Hem DS-Four'. Loosely translated, this rhyme states that Brahmins, Banias and Rajputs are thieves, while the rest of society are their victims. The epithets reached their height during the election cam-paign for the UP Assembly in 1993, the most notorious being: 'Tilak, Taraju, Talwar. Maaro Unko Joote Char'. This slogan, with its insistent rhythm in Hindi, advocates that Brahmins, Banias and Rajputs, each identified by a slighting term, be beaten four times with a shoe - a tradi-tionally demeaning form of punishment because of the ritual impurity of leather. While Kanshi Ram and Mayawati denied authorship of such slogans, they served as a simple and dramatically offensive marker of the party's ideological position.
Kanshi Ram's strategy and his larger understanding of social change are now considerably evolved. He no longer believes in the primacy of social reform. Rather, expenditure of effort on any object other than the capture of government is seen to be superfluous. It is administrative power that will bring about desired social change, not vice versa. So he declines to spell out policies on basic issues such as the liberalisation of the Indian economy or on land reforms. His view is that such issues are irrelevant to the project of gaining power, and that the appropriate poli-cies will fall into place once power is attained. His picture of India is of a kind of holy war on the part of the bahujan samaj against their Brahminwadi oppressors. In the context of this war debates about policy are almost frivolities. This is a stance of pure fundamentalism, but it also frees him to engage in the most ruthless pragmatism in the name of capturing power.
Consistent with this stance, Kanshi Ram has become increasingly critical of the institution of reservation in government employment. Reservation is a 'crutch' - useful for a cripple, but a positive handicap for someone who wants to run on his own two feet (Kanshi Ram interview:1996). He now throws off the line that once the bahujan samaj get to power throughout India, it will be they who can condescend to the Brahmins by giving them reservation proportional to their own meagre population. There is more than a little bravado in this, but there is no doubt that Kanshi Ram is now hostile to the system of institutional preference that was the indispensable basis of his own personal and polit-ical career. It seems that he believes that reservation has now done enough for the Scheduled Castes. He notes that of some 500 Indian Admin-istrative Service (LAS) Officers in Uttar Pradesh, 137 are from the Scheduled Castes. By comparison, there are only seven lAS officers from the Backward Castes, six of them Yadavs (Hindustan Times, 6 April 1994). His point is not that there are now too many Scheduled Caste officers -their number conforms strictly to the legal quota - but too few from the Backward Castes. He apparently assumes that the capture of political power will automatically transform the composition of the bureaucratic elite.
The Bahujana Samaj Party first made headway in Punjab, Kanshi Ram's home State, but his primary political task was to wean the Chamars of Uttar Pradesh from Congress. It was Kanshi Ram's fortune that he built the party at the historical moment that the long-term Congress decline became a landslide. The formal entry of his party into Uttar Pradesh was in a by-election in 1985 for the Lok Sabha seat of Bijinor, in which its candidate was Mayawati. She is a Jatav (or Chamar), the daughter of a minor government official in Delhi, and had completed a BA and LLB from the University of Delhi. Mayawati had made contact with Kanshi Ram in 1977 while she was a student, and had gradually been drawn into his organisation. Her opponents in Bijinor included Ram Vilas Paswan - the two have had poor relations since this contest - and Meira Kumar, Jagjivan Ram's daughter, representing Congress. Rajiv Gandhi was at the height of his popularity at the time, and Meira Kumar won the seat easily. But by 1989 the Bahujana Samaj Party had put in five years of solid organising work in UP and also in the neighbouring regions of Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Delhi, and parts of Haryana. And mean-while the Congress Party had slumped in popularity. Kanshi Ram had prepared the ground carefully. He had selected organisers and candidates from a variety of social backgrounds. One of his organisers was Dr Mahsood Ahmed, a temporary lecturer in history at Aligarh Muslim University. Mahsood had become disillusioned with Congress when Indira Gandhi made her infamous tilt towards the Hindus in the early 1980s (Mahsood interview: 27 November 1995). He joined BAMCEF and then switched to DS4 in 1983 as a full-time organiser and fund raiser. Mahsood was later put in charge of the whole of eastern Uttar Pradesh for the Bahujana Samaj Party.
The years of organisation bore fruit in 1989 and 1991. In the four State Assembly and Parliamentary (Lok Sabha) polls for Uttar Pradesh between 1989 and 1991 the Bahujana Samaj Party's share of the vote varied only marginally between 8.7 and 9.4 per cent. But this impressive vote produced a disappointing number of seats - in 1989 the party won thirteen out of 425 State Assembly seats, and in 1991 it won twelve. The party won only two Parliamentary seats in 1989, and one in 1991; Kanshi Ram himself subsequently won a by-election from UP in 1992. Both the strength and the weakness of the party is that its primary 'vote bank', the Chamars, are relatively evenly spread across the State. This spread gives the Bahujana Samaj a chance in a large number of seats, but also make it logically impossible to win even a single seat without strong support from other communities. Although it has attracted a measure of Muslim, Backward Caste and other Scheduled Caste support, it has encountered considerable resistance in these target communities. We need to look more closely at this problem.
First, there is the question of why the majority of Jatavs of western UP deviated from their kinfolk in the eastern part of the State, and continued to vote Congress in 1989 and 1991. The answer to this question is not entirely clear. Some have blamed the result on the poor organising capac-ities of Mayawati - she was in charge of this region - but the deeper reason may be the Jatavs' historical association with B. P. Maurya. In a move of some desperation, Congress resurrected the 70-year-old Maurya as one of four national Vice-Presidents in the run-up to the 1996 elections. But by then Mayawati had become an electorally popular figure in eastern UP. As to the Scheduled Castes other than the Chamars/Jatavs, only Pasis appear to have voted for Kanshi Ram's party in large numbers. The Valmikis (formerly known as Bhangis) voted solidly for the BJP in the 1993 Assembly elections, and the sole Valmiki in the Lok Sabha elected in 1991 represented the BJP (though in 1980 he had been elected for the Janata Party). Mangal Ram Premi MP - his biography is sketched in chapter 8- accounts for the Valmiki support of the BJP by simply advert-ing to the community's dislike of the Chamars (Interview: 4 November 1995). The Chamars are more numerous, better educated and more successful in acquiring reserved positions than the Valmikis, and this tends to produce resentment. Many of the Dhobis too have recently voted for the BJP. In short, Kanshi Ram's party has not solved the problem of how to mobilise all or even most of the Scheduled Castes. The problem that dogged Ambedkar has thus repeated itself in Uttar Pradesh, though Kanshi Ram's Chamars are both more numerous and numerically more dominant among the Untouchables than were Ambedkar's Mahars in the western part of the country.
Among Backward Castes, Kanshi Ram's strongest support has come from the Kurmis. In Bihar, this is an upwardly mobile peasant commu-nity responsible for several of the worst atrocities against Dalits. But in Uttar Pradesh the Kurmis are comparatively low on the scale of prosper-ity. Moreover, they have had a history of anti-Brahmin radicalism - Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur remains a source of inspiration to some of them. And a sprinkling of them had been members of the Republican Party. The Kurmis could see advantage in being associated with a party that was not dominated by the more numerous Yadavs (whose firm affiliation is with Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi Party). As to the large number of other Backward Castes in UP, over the last several years there has been an intense three-way tussle between the BJP, the Bahujana Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party to capture their support. All three have had some success, but perhaps the larger part of this vote is a floating one that will flow with the main political current of the time. The last community to consider is the Muslims. In the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid the Muslims have been politically leaderless. They have shunned Congress for what they see to have been its culpable failure to prevent the demolition of the mosque, and have given considerable support to Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi Party and some support to Kanshi Ram. Thus in the municipal elections of Uttar Pradesh in November 1995 and in the national and UP elections of 1996 it seems that UP Muslims were prepared to vote for whichever party was locally the strongest anti-BJP force. In short, the politics of post-Congress Uttar Pradesh are currently cast largely in terms of community vote banks. Political strategy is a matter of positioning one's party so as to retain one s core vote bank and also attract others at the margins. At least as much as any other player, Kanshi Ram has adapted to this game with calculating skill.

Kanshi Ram and Mayawati in Government

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Before the UP Assembly election (held after the dismissal of the BJP Government), Kanshi Ram entered into an alliance with Mulayam Singh. The primary vote banks of the two men were complementary the Yadavs and the Chamars. This was by no means a 'natural' alliance, since the two communities had engaged in perennial and sometimes violent conflict in the villages. Indeed, the Yadavs had frequently captured voting booths in eastern UP and prevented the Chamars from voting.
But each of the leaders could now see that his prospects were poor without the other, and they agreed on a division of seats so as to combine their vote. The alliance produced a dramatically enhanced increase in seats for the Bahujana Samaj Party (67), but its vote rose less dramatically to .11 per cent (achieved admittedly in a sharply reduced number of contests). Meanwhile the Samajwadi Party won 109 seats and 25.83 per cent of the vote, making it second to the BJP with its 177 seats and 33.3 per cent of the vote.
The Samajwadi Party and the Bahujana Samaj Party were able to form a coalition Government, with Mulayam Singh as Chief Minister. But Kanshi Ram and Mayawati soon came to believe that their party's interests were being infringed by Mulayam - one issue was the alleged kidnapping of one of their candidates during panchayat elections. There was also concern at the number of 'atrocities' perpetrated against Scheduled Caste people, some of them by Yadavs; the belief was that Mulayam was deliberately failing to control his own followers in this matter. But above all Mulayam had brought about the defection of a number of the Bahujana Samaj legislators to his own party - some of them were Kurmis - and was daily seeking to whittle away his coalition partner from above. Accordingly, in June 1995 Kanshi Ram and Mayawati brought the Government down.
Given the overwhelming importance that Kanshi Ram now places on the acquisition of administrative power, his willingness to form a new Government with the support of the 'Manuwadi' BJP becomes more comprehensible. He took the view that so long as he did not have to take orders from the BJP then he was prepared to put up with the odium of being propped up by the party hated by the whole of progressive India. Perhaps conveniently, he argued that the Congress, the Janata Dal and the Communists were as much 'Manuwadi' parties as was the BJP. But there was still an enormous cultural and ideological gulf between his party and the BJP, and it was left to an outsider to play a perhaps crucial role in bridging the gap. Jayant Malhoutra, a prominent industrialist and Member of the Rajya Sabha, did much of the diplomatic negotiation between the leaders of the two parties. He and Kanshi Ram had formed an unlikely friendship several years earlier, and Malhoutra claims that his assistance to Kanshi Ram was motivated by concern to help bring about a 'soft landing' for India after the inevitable clash between the haves and have-nots .
For its part the BJP knew that neither of the other two large legislative parties would support a minority Government of its own. Since the HIP leaders had come to have a special antipathy to Mulayam's rule, their best option was to allow the third and seemingly less threatening party to form a Government - they saw more to fear from the Yadavs than the Dalits. The HIP leadership had in mind the longer-term goal of permanently splitting the vote banks commanded by the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujana Samaj Party, thereby opening up a path to their own domination of Uttar Pradesh.
In June 1995 Kanshi Ram ceded to Mayawati the task of leading the new Government in Uttar Pradesh, and her period as Chief Minister has been a platform upon which Mayawati has built a now considerable polit-ical presence in Uttar Pradesh. Early on the much younger Mayawati was properly regarded as a mere lieutenant of Kanshi Ram, to whom popular accounts suggest she is romantically as well as politically linked. But Mayawati has been able to bring a charisma and liveliness to the hustings that Kanshi Ram himself has lacked. She has represented a novelty - a direct and forthright Dalit woman with courage sufficient to run hard against the powerful institutions that so oppress poor Indians. In short, Mayawati has become both considerably popular and also a force to reckon with.
The Government of 1995 is properly regarded as a joint Kanshi Ram-Mayawati Government - Kanshi Ram continued to reside primar-ily in Delhi but made frequent trips to Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, and was consulted on all major decisions. In terms of new poli-cies or administrative programs, there was little to be seen from the four months of their rule. But this is by no means to say that this was not a signficant or a distinctive administration. Part of its significance resides in the intrusion of a different culture into the machinery of government of the State. Mayawati demonstrated that the Bahujana Samaj's antipathy to 'Brahminwadi' culture was no mere abstraction but was to serve as a guide to the identity of the actual bureaucrats who could be trusted to direct the administration. In a word, Mayawati chose to promote and work through a small coterie of Scheduled Caste officers. For example, the high-caste incumbents in the Chief Secretary and Chief Minister's Principal Private Secretary positions were both replaced by Scheduled Caste officers. Even more controversially, a number of more junior Scheduled Caste officers were favoured with accelerated promotion and positions at the centre of the administration. This change inevitably provoked resentment and the claim that merit had been replaced by casteism.
Within the larger administration of the State Maywati made energetic resort to the device of transfers and disciplinary action against officers found delinquent in one aspect or another. The transfer of senior officials for reasons other than completion of a normal term has become com-monplace in a number of States of India, but by common consent Mayawati engaged in the practice more richly than before in Uttar Pradesh. Quite deliberately she created a climate of fear in order to motivate officials to work to her agenda. She dealt particularly severely with officials judged to have failed to protect the most vulnerable people in a particular District, the Dalits above all. Overwhelmingly condemned in the press, her actions appear to have evoked a sense of satisfaction among common people routinely subjected to official arrogance and callousness. And a number of commentators both within the administration and outside believed that Mayawati had administered a powerful and long overdue lesson to bureaucrats that their place was as servant, not master, of the people.'
The most persistent complaint about the Bahujana Samaj Government was the degree of illicit money it exacted, particularly in the matter of obliging individual bureaucrats regarding their transfer or non-transfer. Given the habitual misuse of public office to derive funds for party if not personal purposes, it would be surprising indeed if some of these stories were not true. What cannot be established is whether such official wrong-doing was conducted on a scale greater than that of earlier administra-tions in Uttar Pradesh. Perhaps a good deal of the problem arose from the callowness of Mayawati and her lieutenants - some of the stories suggest that their insufficient knowledge of the system, and also the hurry they were in, made it difficult for them to derive funds efficiently and quietly. Official corruption is something of an acquired art.
It is clear that Mayawati was not an accessible Chief Minister. Apart from the question of the tightness of her bureaucratic team, she was inaccessible to many of her own Ministers and to representatives of the BJP who felt entitled to a hearing in return for their support of the Government. Some of this inaccessibility may have arisen from motives that were not unreasonable. Thus Mayawati and Kanshi Ram were deter-mined not to run a Government that freely granted favours to people for reasons other than the welfare of the party itself. They were particularly suspicious of requests from politicians where the request seemed to arise from personal pecuniary interest. The problem of inaccessibility was compounded by Kanshi Ram's continuing to reside in Delhi rather than Lucknow throughout the life of the Government. There were also issues of personal style. Mayawati's reputation is one of meting out harshness and even humiliation to those with whom she finds fault, though it is also true that many informants report having experienced no such treatment. On the other side, the practice of showing elaborate respect to the leaders became something of a culture within party circles. This sometimes took the form of touching the feet of Mayawati and Kanshi Ram, a ritual form of respect that now tends to be seen as demeaning and 'feudal' in origin. The complaint is that the two leaders encouraged this practice. In short, there were problems of both process and style that gave rise to considerable resentment and disaffection in Lucknow. This is one, but only one, reason for the large number of defections from the legislative party that took place after the Government fell.
The public style of the Mayawati Government was more abrasive than radical. Indeed, Mayawati's own most provocative gesture was enacted even before she formed her own Government. In March 1994, during the Mulayam Singh government, Mayawati had somewhat casually con-demned Gandhi as 'an enemy of the dalits and the Bahujan samaj at large' (The Telegraph: in March 1994). Despite the frequency of previous Ambedkarite attacks on the Mahatma, Mayawati's remarks occasioned a storm of protest in the pages of the press. The extravagance of this reac-tion was a pointer to the sensitivities aroused by the Dalits' proximity to power in Uttar Pradesh. During her own Government Mayawati curbed her rhetoric - indeed, she felt constrained to lay the customary wreath on the occasion of Gandhi's birth celebration. The most flamboyant gesture of her Government - and here Kanshi Ram's hand is clearly evident - was to build a Pariwartan Chowk or Revolution Square in Lucknow that was to have huge statues of the great figures of anti-Brahmin activism: Phule, Periyar, Ambedkar, Shahu Maharaj. In the event, the Government fell before the statues could be completed. Construction of the Ghowk pro-ceeded around the clock in order to coincide with the staging of a Periyar Mela: this was a celebration of the life and works of the great figure of the Tamil non-Brahmin movement, Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker. The event was less than a resounding success in Lucknow, where Periyar is almost unknown, but the symbolism was probably directed more to Dalits in the south of India.
After the fall of the Bahujana Samaj Government it became fashionable to declare that a great opportunity had been lost by Kanshi Ram and Mayawati: they could have struck a blow for the liberation of the Dalits but they squandered their opportunity in corruption, crassness and the politics of business-as-usual. This is a dubious interpretation. Throughout their brief period of power Kanshi Ram and Mayawati had little room to manceuvre. They had a small minority of MLAs, and they knew they existed on borrowed time from the beginning. At best they could have had about a year in power before elections in mid-1996. There was simply no time to initiate solid administrative or development pro-grams, even if they had the capacity to formulate such initiatives. In these circumstances the politics of symbolism was bound to be the most effective way to encourage their own constituency. But strong symbolism breeds savage reactions in contemporary India, and the New Delhi lead-ership of the BJP found it increasingly difficult to hold State leaders to the bargain of supporting Mayawati in the name of strategic electoral gain. It surprised no one when this leadership bowed to the pressures welling up in Uttar Pradesh and decided to end the life of the minority Government. President's rule intervened until a new Government could be formed after the general election of April 1996; in the event it was not until March 1997 that a new Government took office.

Kanshi Ram And BR Ambedkar

2008-05-26T00:43:00.000-07:00

Born in Punjab in 1934, Kanshi Ram was the eldest of eight siblings.His upbringing was modest: he studied up to graduation, and there was nothing in his early years to suggest that there was a silent political and social revolutionary lurking within.
It was only after he took up a government job in the western Indian state of Maharashtra that he began to be influenced by the writings and political philosophy of BR Ambedkar, a social reformer and architect of free India's constitution.
Mr Ambedkar voiced the concerns of India's low caste community - particularly Dalits - in the run up to the country's independence.In the mid-1960s, Kanshi Ram began to organise Dalit government employees to fight against what he saw as the deeply entrenched prejudice of higher caste people.It was around this time that he decided that he would not marry but dedicate his life to the cause of Dalit improvement.

Mr Ram was one of India's most influential backward caste leadersBy the mid-1980s, he decided to take the plunge into active politics.The result was the formation of the BSP (the Common Man's Party) in 1984.As a politician, he soon began to attract national attention even though he was not renowned for his oratorical skills or for his personal charisma.He excelled however as a master strategist and organiser, and used these strengths to carve out a niche for Dalits.This was done using an often combative and aggressive strategy, with virulent attacks on other political parties which he claimed only represented the interests of higher caste Hindus.
A dictator
The BSP coined slogans such as "tilak, taraju aur talwar, maaro unko joote char", which meant that that the three upper castes of Hindu society (Brahmins, warriors and traders) should all be beaten four times with a shoe.
While Kanshi Ram became a hate figure in the eyes of many upper caste Hindus, his style succeeded in unifying the Dalits under the BSP banner in several states.
The experiment worked particularly well in UP, where the party managed to have its own chief minister on three occasions.
Even his political enemies... acknowledge that politics in substantial parts of northern India can never been the same again.
Elections are due again in the state next year and many analysts see the BSP as the principal challenger to the regional party which is currently ruling the state.
While Kanshi Ram may have helped Dalits to win political and democratic recognition, he often ran his party like a dictator.
His decisions were sometimes arbitrary and he seldom tolerated dissent. His critics also accuse him of making Indian politics even more mired in caste equations than it was before his arrival on the political scene.
But there is little doubt that he changed the character of Indian politics, and his place in history is unlikely to be forgotten.

BIO DATA OF MAYAWATI

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DATE OF BIRTH & PLACE
January 15, 1956, Delhi
FATHER
Mr. Prabhu Das
MOTHER
Mrs. Ram Rati
EDUCATION

B.A., B.Ed., LL.B., education at Kalindi College, University of Delhi (Delhi) and University of Meerut (Uttar Pradesh)
PROFESSION
Political, Social Worker and Lawyer.
OTHER INFORMATION
Teacher, Delhi Administration, 1977-1984.
SPECIAL INTERESTS
Social service for the downtrodden and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to organise weaker sections of the society. Reading, gardening, urban development, planning and labour welfare.
POSITION HELD
Elected to Lok Sabha for first time in 1989.
Re- elected to Lok Sabha for second time in 1998.
Re- elected to Lok Sabha for third time in 1999 & Leader of B.S.P. Parliamentary Party in Lok Sabha.
Re- elected to Lok Sabha for fourth time in 2004 (Resigned on 26th June, 2004)
Elected to Rajya Sabha for first time in April 1994 (Resigned on 25th October 1996).
Re-elected to Rajya Sabha for second time in July 2004 & leader B.S.P. Parliamentary Party Rajya Sabha. (Resigned on 5th July, 2007)
Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh for the first time from 03 June, 1995 to 18 October, 1995, 2nd time from 21 March, 1997 to 21 September, 1997, 3rd time from 03 May, 2002 to 29 August, 2003 and 4th time from 13 May, 2007 to till date.
Elected to Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly for first time in1996.
Elected to Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly for second time in 2002. (Resigned on 28th August, 2003)
President of Bahujan Samaj Party.
COUNTRIES VISITED
Canada (Toronto), Denmark, France, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland (Zurich), Taiwan, U.K. (London and Wolver Hampton), U.S.A. (Orlando, Washington and New York).

PUBLICATION
"Bahujan Samaj Aur Uski Rajniti", October, 2000 (in Hindi)
PERMANENT ADDRESS
13 Mall Avenue, Lucknow, (Uttar Pradesh)

MayawatI:he first Dalit woman to have acceded to the highest office in an Indian state

2008-05-26T00:38:00.000-07:00

Mayawati, a Jatav (Chamar) woman, became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in 1995. She is the first Dalit woman to have acceded to the highest office in an Indian state, but gender is not the most remarkable aspect of this accession. Its special importance arises from the uniqueness of a Dalit becoming Chief Minister through the vehicle of a political party centred on Untouchables themselves. The Bahujana Samaj Party, founded and still dominated by Kanshi Ram, seized its unlikely opportu-nity in UP after the collapse of a Government in which it was junior partner. Mayawati's minority Government was backed for strategic reasons by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and it lasted a mere four months. But the very advent of such a Government had an electrifying effect on Untouchables across India. It was as if the world had been stood on its head, so that the bottom ruled over the top. When Mayawati again came to power in April 1997, this time in actual coalition with the BJP, the event was improbable without being unimaginable. The earlier accession had established, perhaps for the very first time, that the Dalits were a central and not merely a marginal political force.
Installation of two Mayawati Governments is not the only event of recent political significance to the Dalits. At the national level a powerful Dalit leader has emerged within the Janata Dal, the party that formed Governments after the elections of 1989 and 1996. Ram Vilas Paswan was Minister for Labour and Welfare in V. P. Singh's Government of 1989-90, and he was one of the driving forces behind the immensely controversial decision to adopt the Mandal Report and thus extend reservation of public employment to a new class of 'Backward' elements. The intention was to try to create an historic coalition of the downtrodden by joining together the Dalits, the Backward Castes and, after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the Muslims too. While no such secure coalition is yet in sight, its very possibility continues to have political potency. So this aspiration was something of an ideological rationale for the formation of the coalition Government led by Deve Gowda after the inconclusive elec-tion of 1996. Ram Vilas Paswan was Minister for Railways in that Government - he retained the post after the Prime Ministerial change-over of 1997 - and he was widely regarded as the politician most relied upon by Prime Minister Gowda. Kanshi Ram and Ram Vilas Paswan, bit-terly opposed though they are to each other, represent a new Untouch-able politics that is radical and assertive but also ruthlessly pragmatic. For the first time across large parts of India the Dalits have to be taken seri-ously rather than viewed as a vote bank to be exploited by their social superiors.
Still another indication of the new radicalism is the so-called Naxalite activity that has persisted for a number of years in regions of Bihar and also Andhra Pradesh. In Andhra, the violent activity is centred in the same Telengana region that produced a major insurrection at the time of Independence. Untouchable labourers were at the centre of that insurrection . Madigas and also the Mangs have been a key constituent of the new agrarian resistance, though the movement has tended to be led by high-caste figures. While the Naxalite activities of Andhra and Bihar cannot be portrayed as the likely future of Untouchable politics in India as a whole, nor can these movements be dismissed as phenomena relevant only to the most backward regions of India. Like the more widespread and articulate Dalit movement, the insurrectionary labourers of Bihar and Andhra reflect a deep Untouch-able resistance.

Member of Parliament of Bahujan Samaj Party

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Bahujan Samaj Party

Name of Member
Constituency (State)
Email Address

Permanent Address
Telephone Nos.

Delhi Address
Telephone Nos.

Azmi, Shri Iliyas
Shahabad (Uttar Pradesh )

(i) B.N. Degree College, Shahabad,
District Hardoi (Uttar Pradesh)
(0583) 260751,261851

C-1/7, Tilak Lane,
New Delhi - 110 001
Tels. (011) 23782786, 23381786, 9868180355 (M)

Bhai Lal, Shri
Robertsganj (SC) (Uttar Pradesh )

Village-Pachokhar, Post-Usrikhamhriya,
District - Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh
Tels. (0544) 2246028, 09415376370 (M)

192, North Avenue,
New Delhi - 110 001
Tels. (011) 23092738, 09868180957 (M)

Dube, Shri Ramesh
Mirzapur (Uttar Pradesh ) ramesh.dube@sansad.nic.in

Village-Manikpur, Post-Parasipur,
District SRN-Bhadohi, Uttar Pradesh - 221 402
Tel. (05414) 271233

15&17, South Avenue,
New Delhi
Tel. (011) 23795122

Khan, Shri Mohammad Tahir
Sultanpur (Uttar Pradesh )

Benchu Khan Ka Purwa,
Post; K. N. I., Sultanpur
(05362) 224248

51, South Avenue,
New Delhi - 110 011
Tels. (011) 23795297, 23795296, 9868180296 (M)

Muqueem, Shri Mohammed
Domariaganj (Uttar Pradesh )

Village - Misroliya Khalsa,
Post Khaira Khas, Distt. Siddharth Nagar (Uttar Pradesh)
(05541)231313,278682

122, South Avenue,
New Delhi-110 011
Tels. (011) 23795786, 9868180471(M),

Nishad, Shri Mahendra Prasad
Fatehpur (Uttar Pradesh )

Village & P.O.Gadaria, P.S. Jaspura,
Distt. Banda (Uttar Pradesh)
(05192)252125,286380,
(05180)222728,222827 (Fatehpur)

40, North Avenue,
New Delhi 110 001
Tels. (011) 23092433, 9868180297 (M)

Pathak, Shri Brajesh
Unnao (Uttar Pradesh )

B-158, Sector-A,
Mahanagar Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh)
( 0522)2328000,
2324000,2338000
Fax. (0522) 2321104

67, South Avenue,
New Delhi - 110 011
Tels. (011) 23795000, 9868180000 (M)

Prasad, Shri Lal Mani
Basti (SC) (Uttar Pradesh ) lalmani.prasad@sansad.nic.in

Distt. Council Colony,
Vikas Bhavan, Basti (Uttar Pradesh)
(0554)247261,247112,
9415069326 (M)

115, North Avenue,
New Delhi - 110 001
Tels. (011) 23092446, 9868180277 (M)

Rawat, Shri Kamla Prasad
Barabanki (SC) (Uttar Pradesh )

Muzaffarpur, Jhangeerabad
Distt. Barabanki (U.P)
9415596858 (M)

114, North Avenue
New Delhi-110 001
Tels. (011) 23093061, 9868180556 (M)

Rawat, Shri Ashok Kumar
Misrikh (SC) (Uttar Pradesh )

HIG-41, Sector - E,
Aliganj, Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh)
(0522)2371062,2371272

26, South Avenue
New Delhi - 110 011
Tels (011) 23349457, 9868180441(M),9839018831 (M)

Verma, Shri Rajesh
Sitapur (Uttar Pradesh ) rajeshverma@sansad.nic.in, suneetkverma@yahoo.co.in

Town & PO Tambour,
Distt. Sitapur - 261 001(Uttar Pradesh)

Tel. (05862) 257352

14-C, Feroz Shah Road,
New Delhi - 110 001
Tels. (011) 23712609, 23730030

Warsi, Shri Anil Shukla
Bilhaur (Uttar Pradesh )

Vill. & Post - Radhan, Tehsil - Bilhaur,
District - Kanpur Nagar, Uttar Pradesh.

177, North Avenue,
New Delhi - 110 001.

Yadav, Shri Kailash Nath Singh
Chandauli (Uttar Pradesh )

Village - Vartharakhurd, P.O. - Chaubepur,
District - Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh)
(0542)2625377,2625877

B-602, M.S. Flats
New Delhi 110 001
Tels. (011) 23349470,9868180315 (M)

Yadav, Shri Mitrasen
Faizabad (Uttar Pradesh )

(i) Vill. Bhitari and P.O. Kalyanpur, Kewtani
Distt. Faizabad-224 225 (Uttar Pradesh)
(05278)246279,224251

20, North Avenue
New Delhi-110 001
Tels.(011)23092267, 9868180193, 9415047845 (M)

Yadav, Shri Umakant
Machhlishahr (Uttar Pradesh )

Village Chakganj, Alishah, P.O. Nauhara
District Azamgarh (Uttar Pradesh)

222, North Avenue
New Delhi - 110 001
Tels. (011) 23092405, 9868180265 (M)

The Bahujan Samaj Party

2008-02-08T05:41:00.000-08:00

The Bahujan Samaj Party is a national political party in India with socialist leanings. It was formed to chiefly represent Bahujans(BC,SC,ST & Minorities), who are thought by some to be at the bottom of the Indian caste system, and claims to be inspired by the philosophy of Ambedkar. The BSP was founded by the high-profile charismatic leader Kanshi Ram in 1984. The party's political symbol is an elephant. In the 13th Lok Sabha (1999-2004) it had 14 (out of 545) members and currently in the 14th Lok Sabha has 19. The party has its main base in Uttar Pradesh of Indian state, in UP the BSP has formed government several times. Mayawati is the President of the party and has been so for many years. The deep and mutual hostility between the BSP and the Samajwadi Party – the other leading state party in Uttar Pradesh, whose support is mainly obtained from the OBC has led the BSP into allying itself many times with its erstwhile ideological enemies, the BJP. Currently the party supports a Congress led alliance called the United Progressive UPA in the Indian Government.
On 11th May 2007 the state assembly election results made BSP the single majority party since 1991. After 15 years of hung assembly, BSP has won a clear majority in India's most populated state UP. The election results ended the coalition government era in UP by BSP being the single largest party with 206 seats out of 403 seats in the state assembly.. The BSP President begins as the new Chief Minister of UP for the fourth term. She took oath of chief minister along with 50 ministers (cabinet and state rank) on 13th May 2007 at 1:00 PM at Rajbhawan in the state capital Lucknow.